‘The prison don’t talk to you about getting out of prison’: On why prisons in England and Wales fail to rehabilitate prisoners

Abstract

The position of rehabilitation in prisons in England and Wales has long been debated. Yet studies which consider how prisoners experience rehabilitative practices and processes are rare. Drawing on prisoners’ accounts, this article considers their perceptions and lived experiences of the ways in which rehabilitation is influenced by the nature of organizational support for rehabilitation; the characteristics of interventions implemented to support rehabilitation; and the complexion of the prison climate. We find the perception of an institutional failure to take responsibility for rehabilitation. Rehabilitative interventions – notably Offender Management Programmes (OMPS) and work placements – are perceived to be self-serving in rationale. They are experienced as ill-resourced, superficial in approach and unlikely to engender change. The prison climate, characterized by a lack of interest among correctional staff, lack of empathy and concern, and mixed – but often impersonal and sometimes antagonistic – relationships between prison staff and prisoners, further disrupts any ethos of rehabilitation. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Compulsory Labor as a Social Compromise in Modern Criminal Law Relations

“…45/110). It was the expansion of the practice of applying these measures that were called as promising areas for improving the activity of the penal system [7], including in Russia [8, p. 32-42]. Given these circumstances, we can conclude that by the time the bill was discussed on the inclusion in the criminal law of the norm-novels on forced labor in science and in international law, a common understanding of the essence of "alternative criminal punishment" had already developed.…”

Where specialist and mainstream service systems collide: The National Disability Insurance Scheme in prisons

“…Further, service failures (e.g. in relation to mental health), coordination/interface issues, and transition issues in the broader criminal justice system have long been documented (Bullock & Bunce, 2020; Dowse et al., 2009; Doyle, Yates, et al., 2022; Forrester et al., 2018; Human Rights Watch, 2018). Interviewees in our research generally agreed that services for incarcerated people with disability were far from being able to meet their needs, and that peer support often filled some of those gaps—a practice that Gormley (2022) argues can force people with disability into risky power relations with their peers.…”

Anticipated citizenship in the shadow of imprisonment

“…This includes experiences of criminalised people (for a recent exception, see MacIntyre et al, 2021) and prisoners. In line with broader developments in scholarship, prioritising the subjective meaning of sentences (Hall, 2016) or rehabilitation (Bullock and Bunce, 2018), the lens of ‘lived citizenship’ provides a valuable opportunity for exploring how citizenship is understood by those subject to penal sanctions, and influenced by conviction and punishment. It is through this lens, centring on subjective understandings of ‘citizenship’, that this article will explore individuals’ aspirations and expectations of citizenship after imprisonment.…”