Criminalisation, criminal records and rehabilitation: From supervision to citizenship?
| Author | Andrew Henley |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02645505221116457 |
| Subject Matter | Editorial |
Criminalisation,
criminal records and
rehabilitation: From
supervision to
citizenship?
Scholars of criminal justice have long described contact with the penal system as
involving different forms of ‘pain’. Paradigmatically, Sykes (1958) outlined the
‘pains of imprisonment’whereby the incarcerated experience deprivations of
liberty, autonomy, security, goods and services, and heterosexual relationships.
Subsequently, Crewe (2011) described 21st century imprisonment as involving
pains associated with indeterminacy, psychological assessment and self-
government in his analysis of the ‘depth’,‘weight’and ‘tightness’of the contempor-
ary prison experience. However, the notion of a ‘painful’criminal justice experience
has not been limited to studies of incarceration. Durnescu (2011, 2019) applied
Sykes’approach to non-custodial supervision, suggesting that amongst other
‘pains of probation’or ‘re-entry’were the sense of instability or ‘walking on thin
ice’, the uncomfortable aspects of being forced to return to and confront one’s
offending, and the stigmatisation effects of the juridical status of the probationer.
Hayes (2015) has also considered the various ‘pains of community penalties’,
noting how supervision may involve an intrusive and, in some cases, hostile
degree of intervention by various agencies in the lives of lawbreakers.
In addition to this more established focus amongst academics on imprisonment
and community punishment, increasing attention is now being paid to so-called ‘col-
lateral consequences’of a criminal record. These ‘invisible punishments’(Travis,
2002) include numerous de jure provisions and de facto practices which involve
people with criminal records being treated less favourably than others in a wide
range of life domains outside of the sphere of criminal justice and often long after
the completion of their sentences. Scholarship in this field has focused predominantly
on the United States where many thousands of laws exist restricting rights in areas
such as employment, housing, participation in democracy and access to social
security (see inter alia Corda, 2018; Jacobs, 2015; Kirk and Wakefield, 2018).
However, greater focus is now starting to be placed on discriminatory practices
against people with criminal records in Europe (Kurtovic and Rovira, 2017;
Larrauri and Rovira, 2018) and to how this might be tackled (Henley, 2019;
Larrauri, 2014a).
Editorial The Journal of Communit
y
and Criminal Justice
Probation Journal
2022, Vol. 69(3) 273–277
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/02645505221116457
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