ABSTRACT
In the Introduction, we seek to clarify the meaning of social rehabilitation and its role in criminal justice, thereby introducing readers to the contents and aims of the book. By drawing upon existent (however sparse) definitions in the literature, we understand social rehabilitation as a non-paternalistic type of rehabilitation that seeks to restore positive relationships between crime perpetrators and the rest of society, and aims at enabling actual processes of social reintegration. Although the expression ‘social rehabilitation’ figures prominently in the language of domestic and international legal instruments, we emphasise that the normative dimension of social rehabilitation still suffers a certain degree of uncertainty, including significant mismatches with the reality of penal practice. Hence, with this edited volume we aim to resolve this normative uncertainty through an analysis of the following main issues: How much (and what type of) normative weight is social rehabilitation afforded in the penal context? What instruments should criminal legal systems offer to best realise this ideal? Is penal practice consistent with the tenets and aims of this paradigm? How can social rehabilitation pose constraints on punitive penal policies? How is social rehabilitation related to restorative justice? What is the contribution of empirical sciences and lived experience to supporting the fulfilment of social rehabilitation in the penal context? In sum, if social rehabilitation has a place in the penal system, what is, or ought to be, that place?
