Introduction

Recent debates in criminology and criminal justice surround the contemporary place and respective importance of the grand narratives of risk and rehabilitation (Garland, 2001). Ward and Maruna (2007, p 2) note that for the general public, rehabilitation has had a chequered history, becoming somewhat of an unfashionable word of late; while O’Malley (2010, p 3) suggests that the concept of risk has enjoyed a rather more favourable evaluation to become the predominant way of governing all manner of problems. The significance of both concepts being bound and studied together is highlighted by the fact that between 2002 and 2007, the number of breaches of periods of offender rehabilitation on licence and recall to prison in England and Wales rose by 500%, largely as a result of offenders’ risk factors being assessed as unmanageable in the community. The place of rehabilitation and risk in criminal justice has been at the core of recent developments in academic criminological literature. Garland (2001) argues that the decline of the grand narrative of rehabilitation forms a key indicator of change in a reconfigured crime control that prioritises new exclusionary forms of behaviour control and maintenance of social order. The key here is that in the last 25 years, the prison has been re-evaluated from a place of ‘last-chance rehabilitation’ to one of ‘first-opportunity incapacitation’. However, although concern about the rehabilitation of offenders returning to society may have faded or had its hegemony challenged, the central concern to do something constructive for those who ‘come back’ has not been eradicated (Robinson, 2008).

This chapter will therefore discuss the centrality of rehabilitation and, more recently, risk in contemporary criminology and criminal justice. It begins by focusing on the traditional rehabilitative ethos in criminal justice, highlighting the difficulties of defining and understanding the concept, before turning its attention to the crisis in rehabilitation in the late 1970s. Throughout, the chapter will highlight how changes to the legitimacy and character of rehabilitation have been intertwined with broader socio-economic changes, which have profoundly reshaped our understanding of, and feelings towards, the lawbreaker (Young, 1999).

The chapter moves on to outline how the concept of risk has assumed a powerful position as a guiding credo in criminal justice, seemingly able to replace the older, politically naive values of humanism and rehabilitation and allowing for a more exclusionary, punitive and coercive penality (Feeley and Simon, 1994; Pratt et al, 2005).