The rehabilitation industry: Lived experience and performance

Abstract

We approach this essay through a unique observation of being on both sides of the criminal justice system as prisoners and drugs addicts to transitioning into professionals and educators within and around the criminal justice system. We argue that the concept of rehabilitation has – through the neo-liberal capitalist social system – evolved into a Rehabilitation Industry. The essay argues that by defining the concept of the Rehabilitation Industry, society can ask critical questions of how social media, marketing, branding, the public facing performance as well as the dubious claims of rehabilitation is taking place. The principal argument within the essay is that, although often obscured, a fusion of the contemporary digital landscape and capitalism is creating a criminal justice system that harms justice involved people, whilst simultaneously the industry of ‘rehabilitation’ generates a multitude of capitals – economic, cultural, and political – for a whole range of stakeholders – not least those of us with ‘lived experience’ now occupying the justice reform stage.

Introduction

Throughout this essay, we conceptualise and build an argument for the term we define as the Rehabilitation Industry. From the outset, we outline how the criminal justice system has morphed the concept of rehabilitation into commodity (see McCulloch and McNeill, 2007), a product that can be bought and sold for capital, evolving into an industry. The essay will define what we mean by the term ‘rehabilitation’ as it has been – and continues to be – a contested concept within both criminological literature and criminal justice practice. This will lead us to conceptualise how the progressive term rehabilitation has been coopted by the capitalist function of western societies to construct an industry. Furthermore, we will argue that the industry of the criminal justice system and those adjacent to it, have hijacked, bastardised, exploited, and manipulated rehabilitation as a concept, leading to it becoming unrecognisable to many justice involved people who have been on the receiving end of the rehabilitation production line.

Whilst this piece is predominantly rooted in our dual experiences of delivering and receiving criminal justice related interventions, we will build upon and ground our observations in previous scholarship that describes the fluid boundaries and ever-changing nature of punishment, in both prisons and the community, and the insidious relationship between market capitalism and the justice system. The Prison Industrial Complex (Schlosser, 1998) has been well established in the US to conceptualise the forces of neoliberalism and marketisation specifically within carceral institutions. Much scholarship that details mass supervision (McNeill, 2019), mass probation, mass penal control (Phelps, 2020) or the supervised society (Miller, 2021) describes the phenomenon of the increase in community resources, under the bracket of probation, ever-encroaching further into people's lives, extending the net of supervision and surveillance. We draw heavily from the ideas of Stan Cohen (1985) who described the changing nature of social control in punishment, outlining how, the increase in seemingly benevolent practices and systems in the criminal justice system, often serve to increase the sphere of social control, concealing the harms that lie beneath.

We will use personal experience of our transition from prisoners and addicts to professionals and educators, developing a reflexive method of analysis to explain how, within the context of the Rehabilitation Industry, there has been a development of a Rehabilitation Performance. A component part of the Rehabilitation Industry, requiring active stakeholders to insidiously merge the provision of rehabilitation with the production of ‘capital’ within the industry for organisations, services and individuals alike. We will outline how people with lived experience of criminal justice interventions have become key players in maintaining the industry through the presentation of their rehabilitation as illustrations of effectiveness at the cost of many who remain harmed by the system. We conclude with an invite for our academic and lived experience colleagues alike to engage with these ideas for future discussions on the Rehabilitation Industry.

The commodification of rehabilitation

The idea of ‘rehabilitation’ as being a function of criminal justice dates as far back as the birth of the prison itself. The idea that through mechanisms of intervention – whether punitive, medicalised or welfare oriented – the justice system could restore, correct or reform, those who pass through it has taken on different models, forms and levels of prioritisation in the criminal justice agenda, throughout history. In current times, following a trend in the resurgence – at least at the level of discourse – of the rehabilitative ideal, we observe that rehabilitation has become dislodged, disconnected and divorced from its original and practical meaning. In its most basic of understandings, rehabilitation in the context of criminal justice would be oriented around the idea of an offender moving away from a pattern of reoffending due to interventions by the criminal justice system.

However, we observe that, at the level of policy, politics, organisations and in individual practice, rehabilitation has become somewhat of a branding exercise. In the 2021 Prison Strategy White Paper, the word ‘rehabilitation’ appears over 80 times, from discussions on electronic tagging, to the staffing crisis, to the expansion of the prison service (HMPPS, 2021). Community organisations, prison workshops and schemes designed around differing levels of offender management are increasingly being sold – often without evidence – as rehabilitative. We argue that some penal reform aspects of the industry (i.e. services and organisations independently funded to critique and challenge the statutory aspects of the criminal justice system, including lived experience individuals) has also become intrinsic to the performance, as many individuals and organisations claiming to focus on penal reform often engage with the criminal justice system and serve to support a discourse that can often create an illusion of progress in which prison reform practices can be linked to rehabilitation outputs, often without scrutiny. It is in this capacity that we discuss the concept of rehabilitation and therefore the Rehabilitation Industry.

Here, we outline how the all-encompassing and pervasive nature of neo-liberal free market capitalism has captured the concept of rehabilitation, which has led to the Rehabilitation Industry. Navigating through the experiences of numerous prison sentences, addiction and poverty to becoming criminal justice professionals and educators, we argue that the industry that we describe – the Rehabilitation Industry – exists, pervasively, within the arena of politics, prisons, prison reform, probation, community settings and within academia. Perhaps the most damming single feature that characterises the Rehabilitation Industry is the dominating and insidious presence of ‘capital’. The commodification of punishment – at every level – permeates, often without question, the criminal justice sector landscape. We argue that cultural, symbolic and political capital is also up for grabs within the sphere of the Rehabilitation Industry. Furthermore, the capital that is to be accrued is often received by those who are in positions of power and influence, regardless of the failure by those in receipt of such capital to reduce reoffending, improve the state of prisons, reduce the overcrowded prison system, improve public perception of victims receiving justice or constructing a Probation Service that can reduce people being returned to prison after release.

Amid economic marketisation and commodification of criminal justice services – public, private and third sector alike – capitalism has reproduced the economic arrangements of the free market within the criminal justice sphere. Competition, performance measurement, evaluation, anxiety and precarity seemingly relegate the raw material of the Rehabilitation Industry – offenders who sit within the justice system – to the commodity form. In this process, prisoners and justice-involved individuals become potential assets to be fought over in a market-based service delivery model.

The naked truth, the ugliness at the business end of the Rehabilitation Industry, is concealed and mystified through the mobilisation of rehabilitative discourse and an often-unquestioned lexicon of public protection, including from politicians who give speeches, create policy and design central government strategies, to the criminal justice managerial class, over emphasising rehabilitation as a legitimising objective at almost every turning point. ‘Rehabilitation,’ as a discursive tool, does the job of heavy lifting involved to obscure the reality of the punitive harms of the criminal justice system – the pains of imprisonment, punitive risk management structures, the harsh reality of punishment or the ineffective nature of prison resettlement – and constructs the justice system as a benevolent entity primarily concerned with welfare and treatment. Indeed, providers – public, private, third sector and individuals – have a crucial interest in ‘evidencing’ or ‘performing’ the quality and output of rehabilitative interventions in the interest of their own economic growth and sustainability. The insecurity of neoliberal markets and the pressure that this places on organisations and individuals responsible for delivering various mechanisms of rehabilitation means that, increasingly, the Rehabilitation Industry is performed and selectively presented.

The performance of rehabilitation in this manner, can be – and often is – disconnected from the reality in which the service, intervention or project may be received or experienced. In the urgency to evidence and perform, often, it is justice involved people themselves who become rendered as silent bystanders, passive observers or even irrelevant whilst large sums of money are produced and distributed, contracts are landed, PR narratives are constructed on social media and careers are forged and built. The irony is not lost on us that, arguably, the manifestation of the imbalance of power and influence that constructs the Rehabilitation Industry, is the same presence of inequality that perpetuates and even influences many social factors that drive and underpin the criminality that the criminal justice system is seeking to eradicate.

Rehabilitation performance

It is at an intersection of neoliberal capitalism, the rise of social media and the philosophy of brand management marketing, the performance of rehabilitation becomes most overt, and arguably most distasteful. The insidious and pervasive nature of a highly precarious, marketised, and competitive landscape means that, not only are potential key actors in the criminal justice sector in a constant state of competition for funding streams, contracts and survival, but also that, because of this, they are increasingly operating in the business of self-promotion, public relations and marketing. The criminal justice sector is by no means alone in this. Over the last decade, there has been a significant shift in how corporations, institutions and individuals – the rise of the ‘influencer’ – conceptualise themselves, not only in the primary form but increasingly as brands. Brand management is often accompanied by a constructed social media presence, careful consideration of optics and promotional strategies involving social media. Criminal justice institutions, organisations, consultants and freelancers all have a vested interest in claiming and evidencing/performing their work or projects under the broad umbrella of rehabilitation or reform. From prisons posting about their inclusive sports days, or park runs on Twitter (now X), to education providers cherry-picking success stories to be amplified in marketing literature, to individual freelancers regurgitating the words of participants from workshops in self-congratulatory posts on LinkedIn; often, in the rush to promote good news stories, the rehabilitative quality of such work can be overstated and promotion is done so without scrutiny, regulation and accountability – or consent.

The aim here is not to lay a moral condemnation on those who operate within this framework, as we can offer personal examples of our own rehabilitation performance. Nor is it to disparage or cast judgment on anyone who operates within the field of criminal justice practice. The aim is to take stock of ways in which the social structure – that we all operate within – often influences and leads well-meaning people, politicians and organisations into a direction that inadvertently silences the very people we are aiming to support and consider the competitive framework in which we operate. The irony is that if we accept this notion, we can develop empathy with many of those involved in offending as we can reflect and understand that the ecological systems, we navigate can influence our own behaviour in subtle ways, just as it often has with theirs. Pondering through reflexivity has led us to consider our own position and actions as active participants in both criminality and the performance that functions around the operationalisation of criminal justice and punishment.

One of the critical strengths of experiential knowledge of criminal justice interventions has been claimed to be that it can ‘cast light on the inner recesses of the criminal justice machine, illuminating mechanisms whose only real function seems to be the confinement of millions of men and women in cages’ (Ross et al., 2014: 170). A claim that this perspective can critique and challenge a justice system that seemingly incarcerates the masses unchallenged. However, we argue that as we navigated the ‘pains of transition’ (Brierley, 2023: 11), we have accumulated an experiential knowledge of rehabilitation performance, a key function of the Rehabilitation Industry and become active players in the marketisation and commodification of punishment and rehabilitation ourselves. To develop our own career paths and progress from dysfunctional, tragic lives of addiction and prison, we have reluctantly participated in using social media to further our own careers post entering and speaking to prisoners, both children and men. This has led us to taking pictures outside prisons and uploading them to social media while people suffer behind the prison walls, without their consent – even though many of them would recognise us as previously being ‘one of them’. A performance we have continued to witness across youth justice, probation, third sector and lived experience actors like us.

If one takes note of the public-facing narratives presented by many organisations and individuals working in and around the criminal justice system, particularly those responsible for rehabilitative work, they will recognise that there are often only positive news stories of how effective their interventions have been. However, there is very little evidence of breaches of orders, physical interventions, segregation, further offences, self-harm, violence or poor practice, which is inevitably a daily occurrence for many criminal justice organisations responsible for rehabilitation. This is a component part of the Rehabilitation Industry we define as ‘hidden truths,’ which can obscure and conceal such harms from many in the public who wouldn’t access reports from the bureaucratic regulatory mechanisms such as His Majesties Inspectorate of prisons and probation. The point here is not to claim that negativity should be constantly presented to members of the public, but rather that the absence of such truths develops a false performance to the public and can act in the self-interests of organisations and individuals with power and influence claiming to rehabilitate justice involved people and overstating their contribution to reduce the ‘stubbornly high reoffending rates’ outlined by the government (HMPPS, 2021: 7). These narratives from systems and individuals of power are hard to contest for the often socially excluded who are on the receiving end of these highly contentious claims. This is a further component part of the Rehabilitation Industry as ‘hidden truths’ create ‘hidden harms’.

Our own experiential knowledge of prison, practice and research has initiated a reflexive exploration of what we have done, how we have performed it, and, more importantly, ‘why’ we have performed it. Regardless of intentions, presenting an image of positive interventions to the public in the absence of the ‘hidden truths’ or hidden harms’ makes us complicit members of the Rehabilitation Industry. Perhaps an unpopular position to take, nevertheless, we argue that people with a lived experience of criminal justice interventions are not somehow exempt from the industry. It is the case, especially in the realm of prison reform, that lived experience actors, however well intentioned, occupy a space of high visibility and influence that can contribute to the construction of the illusion of progress.

The idea that a handful of specific individuals – ourselves included – populating a roster of keynote speakers as public activists within the prison reform and academic landscape has any tangible effect for those currently sat within the prison walls, navigating licenses and community orders, is, in our view, yet to be evidenced. Indeed, some formerly incarcerated scholars have a belief that the popularisation of ‘lived experience’ in the criminal justice arena has evolved into a fetishization whereby individuals are trading off their stories for capital (Warr, 2020). There is almost no escaping the transactional relationship between those of us with a lived experience and the various forms of capital to be gained, or, more cautiously we may add, exploited in several ways. This is not to deny the utility of using lived experience in the rehabilitation and reform arena. Moreover, to take stock and be honest about all our complicity in the pervasive nature of the Rehabilitation Industry.

Inevitably, we accept that the social framework of inequality does not solely impact criminal justice, and that the framework of neo-liberal capitalism permeates the very fabric of modern services into industries through the development of industrialisation of public facing services. However, by conceptualising the Rehabilitation Industry and its central components, we hope to contribute to the criminological conversation around commodification and initiate a focus on the key components to hopefully draw questions towards day-to-day practices that are highly questionable at best, and harmful at worst. It is only once a light has been shone on a specific area of practice that policy can be shaped to direct, critique, explore its purpose, it's function and more importantly investigate the consequences. Our hope is to provoke a critical conversation regarding the Rehabilitation Industry and allow the criminal justice sector to evaluate what may appear to be features of a progressive criminal justice system, but is nevertheless, a legitimate site for critique at the intersection of punishment, neoliberalism and the contemporary digital landscape.

Conclusion

Throughout this short essay, we have defined our concept of the Rehabilitation Industry. We have argued that within the Rehabilitation Industry, the term ‘rehabilitation’ itself has been hijacked and exploited by the various cogs within the machine due to its commodification constructing capital for a range of individuals and organisation with self-interest to generate capital and hide hidden truths that cause hidden harms, ranging from politicians, to organisations, whether private, public or third sector, and how these stakeholders – including those with criminal justice experience – have been integrated as a rehabilitation performance cog within the industry. As we have defined and introduced these terms, we encourage further investigation and research to examine the impact of the Rehabilitation Industry on those who enter it as justice involved people and invite critique of our epistemological understanding through lived, practice and theoretical perspectives. We also encourage all stakeholders to consider their behaviour and reflect on the mechanical dynamics at play.