Editorial: Moral Panics, and Knee Jerk Reactions: Pitfalls to a Positive Approach to Resettlement and Reintegration

AuthorPaul Senior

In May and June 2014 the escape of the offender known in the press as the "skull cracker" Wheatley, and other high-profile failures of the temporary release schemes produced an immediate backlash by government, imposing restrictions on the use of temporary release and questions, at the extreme end of the commentary, about the utility of this process at all. I arrived in New Zealand towards the end of October 2014 at a time when a notorious New Zealand prisoner called Philip Smith had been released on a temporary licence but had fled to Brazil via Chile and also precipitated an immediate suspension of the temporary release programme for all prisoners there.

Both examples illustrate perfectly the problems of maintaining a positive approach to resettlement and reintegration when such cases, no matter how exceptional, drive policy down a route which is counter-intuitive to good resettlement practice in the system. In western neoliberal democracies the anxiety about the 'other' always produces this kind of overreaction. It is important to try and resist taking precipitate action on such incidents and rather make decisions based on good practice not such exceptional cases.

In England and Wales the process of temporary release, by any measure, is successful. The latest figures available in the UK follow the year 2012 (MoJ, Statistical Notice, Releases on temporary licence, 2012). This shows that there were 485,000 instances of release involving a total of 11,400 individual prisoners and that less than 1%, a total of 428, were recorded as fails on the administrative systems. Of these only 26 recorded a failure due to an arrest for a suspected offence. Whatever else we can draw from the...

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