Book review: Lol Burke, Steve Collett and Fergus McNeill, Reimagining Rehabilitation: Beyond the Individual
| Author | Asbjørn Storgaard |
| DOI | 10.1177/2066220319881597 |
| Published date | 01 August 2019 |
| Date | 01 August 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
https://doi.org/10.1177/2066220319881597
European Journal of Probation
2019, Vol. 11(2) 114 –118
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/2066220319881597
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Book reviews
Lol Burke, Steve Collett and Fergus McNeill, Reimagining Rehabilitation: Beyond the Individual,
Routledge, 2019, 206 pp.: ISBN 978-1-138-23318-8, £19.99 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Asbjørn Storgaard, Lund University, Sweden
In Reimagining Rehabilitation, the authors of the seminal Delivering Rehabilitation
(2015), Lol Burke and Steve Collett, join with Fergus McNeill to take up once again the
2015 discussion on the (not so successful) recent reforms of the criminal justice system
in England and Wales. On a very general plane, Reimagining Rehabilitation can be
viewed as a synthesis of Burke and Collett’s previous analysis of the political underpin-
nings of the contemporary problems for rehabilitation and its dystopian prognosis for
social justice with McNeill’s theory of the forms of rehabilitation (cf. “Four forms of
‘offender’ rehabilitation: Towards an interdisciplinary approach”, published in Legal and
Criminological Psychology in 2012). However, as the title suggests, Reimagining
Rehabilitation not only sketches out problems, it also contributes (or at least begins to do
so) to a constructive reimagination of this topic.
As in the case of Delivering Rehabilitation, the investigations in Reimagining
Rehabilitation relate to the context of England and Wales (and to a lesser extent Scotland).
The authors claim that the book should, however, be of interest to scholars and practi-
tioners who are not intimately familiar with these particular criminal justice systems and
social policies. As the following review will substantiate, I can definitely attest to this
(even if a gentle caveat concerning direct transference of tangible proposals between the
UK and e.g. Scandinavia must be expressed).
In the first two chapters, the authors clarify the key concepts of the investigations to
follow (e.g. rehabilitation, social control, deviance and normalcy), present the ongoing
debate as to whether rehabilitation sometimes work or does not work at all and discuss
the historic development of neoliberal policies and their impacts on the criminal justice
systems of mainland Britain. From the outset, it is made perfectly clear that the authors
argue in favor of what one may call a “rehabilitation of rehabilitation” by way of a criti-
cal appraisal of what does and does not constitute a purposeful coherence between means
and ends in rehabilitative work and policy. Drawing on Cohen’s Visions of Social Control
(1985), the authors discuss the logical “space” as well as the practical and legal possibili-
ties for criminal justice instances to move beyond the short-term purpose of providing
organized and systematic punishment towards a criminal justice system that “does good”
on grander societal scale:
881597EJP0010.1177/2066220319881597European Journal of ProbationBook reviews
2019
Book reviews
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