Introduction

This book aims to make a case for and provide some of the resources necessary for reimagining rehabilitation for the twenty-first century. We consider this to be essential given the current difficulties facing the criminal justice system in England and Wales following the changes introduced by the current government’s 2014 Transforming Rehabilitation initiative. This chapter introduces the reader to the work of the late Stanley Cohen in his seminal publication, Visions of Social Control (1985) and unravels recent and current conceptualisations of rehabilitation including trends in the popularity of certain approaches to working with individuals who offend. By taking one of the current author’s (McNeill) formulations of rehabilitation as comprising personal, legal/judicial, moral and social elements, this introduction poses the question about the kind of society we want to live in and strive for.