Introduction

Within the UK and most industrialised countries, rehabilitation has been one of the espoused aims of criminal justice, which is taken in part to reflect a ‘civilised’ society through a commitment to human rights. In practice and at least since the 18th century (see Gough, Chapter Four, this volume; Priestly and Vanstone, 2010), it is an inherently political and ideologically contested concept intertwined with debates concerning the aims, nature and justification of punishment and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Over a timeline of 40 years, debates concerning ‘offender’ rehabilitation largely based upon a narrow positivism have gone from ‘Nothing works’ (Martinson, 1974) and the increased use of retributive ‘just desert’ approaches to punishment, to the ‘what works’ (McGuire, 1995) centrally driven corrections industry. The failures of these approaches mean that we are now in a post-‘what works’ era. Therefore, despite claims by government of the need for ‘evidence-based’ policy (see Pawson, 2006), these approaches are not value-free, technically driven discussions, but are directly linked to political processes and to what the state requires of those punished.

Rehabilitation becomes one of those ‘taken-for-granted’ but problematic concepts that pervade professional and political parlance. It is generally seen as a good thing along with related concepts such as ‘multi-agency working’ or ‘diversity’, but all are similarly nebulous, imprecise, lacking in clarity and subject to the whims of political change and media manipulation.

Rehabilitation as a set of ideas and practices is, of course, not specific to criminal justice but the latter has drawn upon important developments in medicine, psychotherapy, psychology and social work. Until the development of therapeutic jurisprudence by Winick and Wexler (2003; see van Wormer and Starks, Chapter Nine, this volume), it is difficult to think of any successful or original approach to rehabilitation that has been initiated by criminal justice; rather, a range of religious, humanistic and philanthropic individuals and organisations have sought to ameliorate the worst effects of the raw power of the retributive state.