About Us
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. For example, recent research suggests that ‘rehabilitation’ has become focused on managing risks rather than enabling reintegration and that, in consequence, it often hurts and harms those that it claims to help.
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.
Through a new approach called Dialogical Comparative Penology (DCP), which will involve our project’s participants in making the comparisons between the countries, RaRiE will provide a uniquely comprehensive analysis of the nature and impact of rehabilitation in these three nations. It will also develop new ways of critically assessing rehabilitation so as to better direct future developments.
In and through dialogue with policymakers, senior leaders in prison and probation systems, practitioners, activists and people with lived experience of rehabilitation, RaRiE aims to improve the fairness and effectiveness of European penal systems.
RaRiE’s ambition -- the ‘step-change’ it offers – lies both in developing a new approach to comparative penology, and in using that new approach to reshape how rehabilitation is understood and developed in Europe, and perhaps further afield.
