Rehabilitation within pre-crime interventions: The hybrid criminology of social crime prevention and countering violent extremism
| Author | Charlotte Heath-Kelly,Sadi Shanaah |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13624806221108866 |
| Published date | 01 May 2023 |
| Date | 01 May 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Rehabilitation within pre-crime
interventions: The hybrid
criminology of social crime
prevention and countering
violent extremism
Charlotte Heath-Kelly
University of Warwick, UK
Sadi Shanaah
University of Warwick, UK
Abstract
Criminological literature frequently argues that the rehabilitative penological paradigm
of the 20th century (‘penal welfarism’) has been replaced by pre-crime, risk-based,
‘new penology’. Under the conditions of social and economic neoliberalism, it is claimed,
the commitment to rehabilitating individuals has been withdrawn. In this article, we
explore the curious persistence of rehabilitation—enacted within crime prevention
and countering-violent-extremism programmes. We show that rather than ‘new pen-
ology’replacing ‘penal welfarism’, the history of social crime prevention programmes
demonstrates the presence of a ‘hybrid penology’. Here, rehabilitation was brought
into the pre-criminal space and practised upon pre-delinquents. This pre-emptive
rehabilitation of at-risk subjects pervaded preventive policy in both Western Europe
and the socialist Former Yugoslavia. In both case studies, this logic of pre-crime rehabili-
tation then transferred into the counterterrorism sector—with ideological dissidence
identified as the threshold for reform-oriented intervention. Rehabilitation remains
with us, warped by the turn to pre-emption.
Corresponding author:
Charlotte Heath-Kelly, Politics and International Studies, Social Sciences, University of Warwick, Coventry,
CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: c.heath-kelly@warwick.ac.uk
Article
Theoretical Criminology
2023, Vol. 27(2) 183–203
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/13624806221108866
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcr
Keywords
at risk, counter-radicalization, counterterrorism, new penology, P/CVE, pre-delinquent,
rehabilitation, social crime prevention, Yugoslavia, United Nations
When we think about ‘pre-crime’interventions, the last thing we expect to find is an
emphasis on rehabilitation. And yet, the policy paradigms of social crime prevention
and countering violent extremism (which acts to reform the potential terrorist offender)
both centralize rehabilitation—enacted before the crime. This begs the question of why
Criminology has, to-date, separated rehabilitation and pre-emption—allocating them to
different penological ‘eras’.
Criminological literature is profoundly interested in the anticipation and prevention of
crime. Pre-emptive interventions are associated with a paradigmatic shift towards ‘new
penology’—where the rehabilitative methods and ideals of the mid-20th century have
been, it is argued, steadily replaced by risk-reduction under conditions of neoliberal eco-
nomics (Feeley and Simon, 1992; Garland, 2001; Harcourt, 2011; O’Malley, 2010;
O’Malley and Hutchinson, 2007; Rose, 2000; Wacquant, 2009). Here the preventative
state orients towards risk-reducing incapacitation (Feeley and Simon, 1992) of potential
offenders—and away from a rehabilitative ideal based on correcting individual offenders.
As McCulloch and Wilson (2015: 3) describe: ‘Pre-crime distinguishes itself from crime
prevention by the degree in which it uncouples the formulation of crime threat from past
offending.’With the disavowal of past offending as a guide to future criminal acts, the
rehabilitation paradigm of ‘penal welfarism’was made redundant.
Similarly, criminologists find pre-emptive criminal justice extremely prominent in
the field of counterterrorism, where the urgency of public protection drives the turn
towards anticipatory detection (and incapacitation) of extremists and potential terror-
ists. This is practised through the creation of inchoate/precursor offences to terrorism
(Walker et al., 2022; Zedner and Ashworth, 2019), the incapacitation of potential ter-
rorists through home detention (where insufficient evidence exists to prosecute)
(Zedner, 2007) and the use of algorithms to manage the risks of international travel
and financial transactions (Amoore and De Goede, 2005, 2008; McCulloch and
Wilson, 2015).
But, in this rush to map the new era of precursor offences and pre-emptive interven-
tions, do we overlook the continued importance of rehabilitation—even as it sits within
pre-crime measures? Our article asks, how do social crime prevention and radicalization
prevention assemblages complicate assertions that rehabilitation has been side-lined as a
goal and method of crime policy? We focus on both policy areas to show that
risk-reduction and pre-emptive penal methods have not always replaced the rehabilitative
methods of penal welfarism. Rather, social crime prevention and Preventing/Countering
Violent Extremism (P/CVE) programmes demonstrate a profoundly hybrid form of pen-
ality. Both deploy risk assessment to identify individuals ‘at risk’of delinquency and/or
radicalization, and centralize many features associated with neoliberal penality (such as
deploying social assistance to achieve a public protection goal, see O’Malley, 2010: 6);
but they also integrate substantial welfarist and rehabilitative components. P/CVE and
social crime prevention deploy anticipatory rehabilitation through welfare-based
184 Theoretical Criminology 27(2)
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