Book review: Reimagining Rehabilitation: Beyond the Individual

AuthorMaurice Vanstone
Published date01 June 2019
Date01 June 2019
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/0264550519843748
PRB843748 255..261

Book reviews
The Journal of Community and Criminal Justice
Probation Journal
Book reviews
2019, Vol. 66(2) 255–261
ª The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0264550519843748
journals.sagepub.com/home/prb
Reimagining Rehabilitation: Beyond the Individual
Lol Burke, Steve Collett, and Fergus McNeill
Routledge; 2019, pp. 206; £19.99; pbk
ISBN: 978-1138233188
Reviewed by: Maurice Vanstone, Professor Emeritus (Criminology),
Swansea University
Any criminological text that employs the heuristic device of linking Odysseus, Bob
Dylan and Harry Potter is bound to arouse curiosity and expectation, and this cer-
tainly does. A more intelligent, insightful discussion about the future direction
criminal justice rehabilitation should take, or a combination of authors better placed
to deliver it (from the male section of the criminological field), would be difficult to
find. The book, which is a sequel to Delivering Rehabilitation (Burke and Collett,
2015), begins with the problem of defining rehabilitation, which they then disen-
tangle to reveal four meanings and forms, namely: personal and psychological,
judicial or legal, social, and moral. Thereafter, against the background music of
populist Sirens, the body of the text – permeated by deliberations about what kind of
society we wish to inhabit – takes the reader on an exploration of those forms.
Before departure, the authors revisit Stan Cohen’s Visions of Social Control in
order to set a wider context for their reimagining and to answer Cohen’s question
about whether there is still space within the changing political and ‘techno-
bureaucratic’ environment to ‘exert power and to do good at the same time’ (p. 52).
(Maybe it is time we probationistas reclaimed the moniker of ‘do-gooders’!) Their
ensuing deliberations and insights are crucial to a more realistic shaping of per-
sonal rehabilitation that encompasses the legal, moral and social forms too. Using
Odysseus’ journey, in which...

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