Here is a presentation given by Prof Fergus McNeill exploring the issues which are associated with prison, criminal justice and rehabilitation

1. 1
Crime, Punishment and Faith in Change
Fergus McNeill
Professor of Criminology & Social Work
University of Glasgow
Fergus.McNeill@glasgow.ac.uk
@fergus_mcneill

2. What Good is Punishment?
• Punishment is part of the system and
practice of criminal justice.
• So, the prior question is: What (sort
of) good is (criminal) justice?

3. What sort of good is justice?
• ‘Justice is the first virtue of social
institutions, as truth is of systems of
thought’ (Rawls)
– Distributive justice; social justice
• A constitutive good (of the good
society)
• And a productive good (for
humanity)
– ‘Without justice there is no peace’
– Reciprocal social relations and
cooperation are essential to human life
(and evolution)

4. And criminal justice?
• Offending violates reciprocities; sanctions exist to
secure or to restore a ‘just order’ of things
– in this sense they are a productive good
• Sanctions are also a communicative good
– They affirm and express values (and say something about us in
the process)
• But… they can involve negative and/or positive
exercises of power
• And their actual (as opposed to intended) effects are an
object of empirical enquiry which has normative
consequences

5. ‘The essence of
punishment,
[Durkheim] claims, is
irrational, unthinking
emotion driven by
outrage at the violation
of sacred values or else
by sympathy for fellow
individuals and their
sufferings’ (Garland,
2013: 25).

6. • ‘Would you prevent crimes? Let liberty be
attended with knowledge. As knowledge
extends, the disadvantages which attend it
diminish, and the advantages increase...
Knowledge facilitates the comparison of
objects, by showing them in different points
of view. When the clouds of ignorance are
dispelled by the radiance of knowledge,
authority trembles, but the force of the law
remains immovable’ (Cesare Beccaria (1775)
in Priestley & Vanstone, 2010: 11).
– Evidence and principle, science and
law, empirical and normative

7. What is punishment,
philosophically?
• The standard definition
1. An intentional infliction of harm or hardship
on a person, imposed…
2. In order to reproach that person for a
criminal wrong that that person is found to
have committed…
3. By someone entitled to make this wrong his
or her business and to perform the
punishing act.
(du Bois Pedain, 2017)

8. What is punishment,
philosophically?
• The standard definition
1. We can’t usually inflict such harms on one
another
2. The reason we can punish refers back to the
wrong and what we must communicate
about it
3. The punisher must have the authority to do
this unusual thing; the punished person is
rightly subject to that authority
(du Bois Pedain, 2017)

9. A gap in this account:
Reintegrative momentum?
• ‘As a general social practice, punishment does not
merely mark out the punishee’s actions as wrong and
blames him for engaging in this wrongful act. It also
defines how both punishee and punisher will move
forward from here. The penal agent lays down the terms
of his or her future co-existence with the offender in a
shared social world. Because this is punishment’s central
social function, there is reintegrative momentum
inherent in punishment that gives the offender himself
an interest in being punished. Far from threatening or
challenging an offender’s membership in the
community, punishment reasserts or reinforces it’ (du
Bois Pedain, 2017: 203).

10. Reintegrative momentum,
in practice?
• [Even if you don’t agree entirely with that
argument, whether you are a reductivist or a
retributivist, you have to care about
reintegration…]
• In practice, reintegrative momentum is very hard
to generate and very easily lost by penal agents
in three penal moments:
– When we sentence
– When we implement sentences
– When sentences end

11. To penalise or not?
• If, when we seek to right wrongs, we are aiming at
relational re-integration, how should that influence our
choices about how to respond?
• To repair reciprocal relations, we usually need apology,
remorse, repair and/as positive change.
• Mostly, we pursue these things through conversation
and cooperation.
• In response to serious criminal wrongs, sometimes we
need complusion and constraint.
• But compulsion and constraint pose problems for repair,
positive change and for conversation and cooperation...
And that creates major problems for reintegrative
momentum.

12. Sanctions that
decelerate reintegration
Negative power/
Slicing off
• Imposing harms
• Taking away life
• Taking away (negative) liberty
• Taking away time or demanding effort
• Taking away worth/money
• Taking away status/standing/recognition
• Costs?

13. An exemplar of
disintegrative punishment
’In all societies, the stigma of criminal convictions and sentences of
imprisonment creates difficulties for ex-offenders when they try to secure
employment, find housing, form relationships, or resettle in the outside
world. But in the United States, these de facto social consequences of
conviction are exacerbated by a set of de jure legal consequences that
extend and intensify the sanction in multiple ways. Disfranchisement, either
temporary or permanent; disqualification from public office and jury service;
ineligibility for federal housing benefits, education benefits, and welfare
assistance; liability to court costs and prison fees; exclusion from various
licensed occupations; banishment from specified urban areas; and where
the offender is a noncitizen, deportation—all of these are concomitants of a
criminal conviction for millions of individuals… the result [is] that potential
employers, landlords, and others are legally permitted to discriminate
against an individual on the basis of his or her prior convictions, or on the
basis of prior arrests, even when these were for minor offenses or offenses
that occurred many years previously’ (Garland, 2013: 478-79).

14. Sanctions that
accelerate reintegration
Positive power/
Grafting in
• Requiring goods
• Life enhancing
• Developing (positive) liberty
• Constructive time and work
• Enhancing worth/Compensating loss
• Risks?

15. Restriction and
‘Corrections’
Sanctions as
Redress for
Breaches of
Reciprocities
Retribution
(Compulsory
losses)
Reparation
(Voluntary
contributions)
Rehabilitation
(as process)
Re/integration
(as outcome:
Restoration of
Reciprocities)

16. Four paths to reintegration
16

18. The Traveller:
Personal rehabilitation
• The re/development of the self
• ‘Human capital’ or human potential
• Motivation and skills
• Identity and values
• Narratives
• Corrections and [returning] citizens
• Self-development and self-recognition?

19. Passport control:
Judicial rehabilitation
• The ‘requalification of the juridical subject’
(Beccaria, Foucault)
• Formal de-labelling
• Status elevation/restoration
• A responsibility of the punishing state, when
punishment is complete?
• Corrections, the courts and the law
• Formal recognition of restored status (human
and/or civil rights)?

20. Dialogue and destination
Moral and Political Rehabilitation
• Provision of redress (not to the state but…)
– To victims
– To communities
– To offenders (for prior injustice & incidental pains)
• The relational restoration of the reciprocal bonds of
citizen, civil society and state: a duty of all three
• Re/enfranchisement
• Corrections, the state and civil society
• Moral recognition, political representation

21. Companions and Climate:
Social Rehabilitation
• The recognition of a new or restored social
identity
• The elevation or restoration of social status
• The re-development of social capital,
connection, resources
• A responsibility of all citizens and of civil society
(resourced by the state)
• Corrections, communities and soft landings
• Social recognition, material redistribution?

22. Conclusion:
Generating reintegrative momentum?
• You don’t fix a tear by working on one side
• Both the tear and the repair are relational
– Between the people involved
– Between citizen, civil society and state
– Processes of mutual recognition
• Structure and culture shape the relational possibilities…
and the problems
– It is necessary to work on both sides of the tear
– The needle hurts but the thread binds; it is better to live with a
scar than an open wound.

23. • www.distantvoices.org.uk
• www.pervasivepunishment.com