Integration and reintegration: Comparing pathways to citizenship through asylum and criminal justice
| Author | Steve Kirkwood,Fergus McNeill |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895815575618 |
| Published date | 01 November 2015 |
| Date | 01 November 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2015, Vol. 15(5) 511 –526
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1748895815575618
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Integration and reintegration:
Comparing pathways to
citizenship through asylum
and criminal justice
Steve Kirkwood
The University of Edinburgh, UK
Fergus McNeill
University of Glasgow, UK
Abstract
The development of scholarship related to particular categories of people who are subject to different
forms of social control often results in subfields that become or remain isolated from each other. As
an example, theory and research relating to the reintegration of ex-offenders and the integration of
asylum seekers have developed almost completely independently. However, both processes involve
people who are marginalized and stigmatized through legal and social processes, and policies and
practices in the two fields share somewhat similar concepts and goals. This article therefore seeks
to identify insights through a critical comparison of these two areas of research, theory and practice,
with the intention of enriching our understanding of both. This comparison highlights that the
frameworks reviewed here enable us to move beyond a narrow focus on service user’s behaviours,
needs or risks, and into an examination of questions of identity, belonging and justice.
Keywords
Asylum seekers, desistance, offenders, rehabilitation, reintegration
Introduction
The development of scholarship related to particular categories of people who are sub-
ject to different forms of social control often results in subfields that become or remain
isolated from each other, reinforced by artificial boundaries between professional bodies
Corresponding author:
Steve Kirkwood, The University of Edinburgh, Chrystal Macmillan Building, 15a George Square, Edinburgh
EH8 9LD, UK.
Email: s.kirkwood@ed.ac.uk
575618CRJ0010.1177/1748895815575618Criminology & Criminal JusticeKirkwood and McNeill
research-article2015
Article
512 Criminology & Criminal Justice 15(5)
and academic disciplines. This means that advances in knowledge may not always cross
from one subfield to another. As a specific example, practice and theory relating to the
integration of asylum seekers and the reintegration or rehabilitation of ‘ex-offenders’
have largely developed in isolation from one another. However, in both contexts, similar
processes and goals apply, and in both contexts these processes and goals relate to people
who are marginalized through formal legal and informal social processes. For these rea-
sons, we suspect there is much to gain through critically comparing these two fields. In
this article we do this by exploring the resonance of McNeill’s (2012) model of ‘Four
forms of “offender” rehabilitation’ with the experiences of asylum seekers and the reso-
nance of Ager and Strang’s (2004) model of ‘Indicators of integration’, originally devel-
oped for use with refugees and asylum seekers, with the experiences of ex-offenders. Our
intention is that such a cross-field comparison will help advance theory and understand-
ing relating to both subfields and in doing so, work towards the development of a broader
framework in which knowledge regarding integration and citizenship can be pooled in
order to progress theory and practice in social work and related disciplines.
This article contributes to the growing body of research and theory on the intersec-
tions between criminal justice and immigration policies and practices (e.g. Aas, 2011;
Bosworth and Guild, 2008; Malloch and Stanley, 2005; Pickering and Weber, 2014).
Much of this research has been concerned with the criminalization of migrants and much
of it therefore brings critical criminological notions to the understanding of attempts to
control migration, focusing on aspects of border control, policing and detention. The
present article takes a somewhat different approach by bringing concepts from migration
studies to the examination of criminological issues and by specifically engaging with
issues of rehabilitation and reintegration.
Two Models of (Re)integration
McNeill’s (2012) Four forms of ‘offender’ rehabilitation
McNeill’s (2012) model first evolved in the context of a somewhat technical debate about
evidence-based practice in ‘offender rehabilitation’. His article begins with a review of
current arguments about what a credible ‘offender’ rehabilitation theory requires and by
exploring some aspects of current debates about different theories. It goes on to locate this
specific kind of contemporary theory-building in the context of historical arguments about
and critiques of rehabilitation as a concept and in practice. More pertinent in the context of
the current discussion, in the third part of the article, he examines the nature of the relation-
ship between ‘desistance’ theories (explaining how and why people stop offending and
progress towards social integration) and rehabilitation theories, so as to develop his con-
cluding argument that narrowly conceived debates about the merits of different forms of
‘psychological rehabilitation’ have been hampered by a failure to engage fully with debates
about at least three other forms of rehabilitation (legal, moral and social) that emerge as
being equally important in the process of desistance from crime. The concluding discus-
sion of the article is introduced coincidentally with a quote that deploys the metaphor of
mobility (perhaps even implicitly, migration):
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