Away from the faeries: the rehabilitation of Tam Lin
Fergus McNeill asks: 'what does an old Scottish folk-tale have to teach us about the meaning of rehabilitation?'
Until recently, the study of penal systems has focused mainly on their most severe or repressive features (like imprisonment or the death penalty). However, there is now much evidence that these systems often do great harm even when aiming to do good, not least by expanding the scale, reach and intensity of penal control.
By examining evidence from three countries that are often considered to have relatively ‘progressive’ penal systems and approaches (the Netherlands, Norway and Scotland), the RaRiE project aims to help better understand whether and where rehabilitation lives up to its ideals, and to creatively, critically and comparatively interrogate its development and prospects, its coherences and contradictions, its rhetoric and its realities, its pitfalls and its possibilities.