The Enigmas of Rehabilitation and Resettlement: Forms of Capital, Desistance and the Contextualisation of Carceral‐Community Offender Transitions

Abstract

In England and Wales the government project of Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) has raised even further the profiles of rehabilitation and resettlement in penal policy. However, the question of what rehabilitation and resettlement precisely mean has once again been glossed over. This article returns to these problematics and asks whether, in the context of post‐carceral transitions, concepts of social and human capital might have wider resonance in penal policy. It is argued that the work of Bourdieu may have much to offer in reframing the delivery of rehabilitation and resettlement programmes for offenders faced with the diverse challenges of societal return.

Resilience in the Face of Victimization: A Bourdieusian Analysis of Dealing With Harms and Hurts Among Street-Involved Individuals Who Smoke Crack Cocaine

“…Thus, while building their resilience in the street field (e.g., enacting violent revenge, engaging street social support), a cementing of structural marginalization occurs simultaneously. This is particularly evident in research on the carceral habitus, “a set of corporeal dispositions characteristic of those having passed through institutions of legal punishment” (Shammas, 2017, p. 10), which examines the effects of prison on inmates and the challenges to reintegration following incarceration (Caputo-Levine, 2012; Moore, 2019). The habitus is transposable; people carry their dispositions with them as they enter new circumstances and fields (Bourdieu, 1997/2000; Fleetwood, 2016).…”