Introduction

The idea and practice of rehabilitation and reintegration of justice-involved persons as one of the main goals and principles of punishment have been well-established principles of modern criminal justice systems (Rotman, 1990). Rehabilitation and reintegration as a field of policy and practice and the ‘enormous social struggles faced by formed prisoners to reintegrate … has gone from essentially a non-topic in the 1980s and 1990s to being possibly the hot topic in recent years’ (Maruna, 2020: 577). The story usually goes that those who have excluded themselves by upsetting moral, social and legal norms are expected to re-enter and re-attach themselves to the ‘circuit of inclusion’ (Rose, 2000: 324). Throughout this chapter it will be shown how the policy field of reintegration and rehabilitation under neoliberal rule takes on particular shapes and practices. Different configurations of neoliberal rule demand not only that ‘law-breakers’ become law-abiding citizens, but also that they become productive members of society who can avail themselves of opportunities in highly unequal and competitive societies. In market-oriented penal politics, citizens are re-educated ‘to become self-reliant and enterprising through property ownership, minimising their demands on public welfare, adapting to more precarious labour markets and adhering to marketized norms and traditions’ (Corcoran, 2020: 23). Underpinned by the modern penal welfare state's structures and practices (Garland, 2001), contemporary rehabilitation and reintegration regimes offer and sometimes also demand engagement with various services such as education and training, employment, welfare, addiction, housing or family support services. Informed by previous critiques of welfarist practices, it is posited that seemingly well-intentioned supports can equally be understood as further attempts of containing what are perceived as ‘social problem’ populations: ‘Re-entry programs are not an antidote to but an extension of punitive containment as government technique for managing problem categories and territories in the dualising city … re-entry must therefore be understood as an element in the redrawing of the perimeter, priorities, and modalities of action of the state as a stratifying and classifying agency and not as an “industry” geared to “reintegrating” a marginalised population that was never socially and economically integrated to start with’ (Wacquant, 2010: 616).