ABSTRACT
One of us has previously argued that the personal, legal, social and moral aspects of re/habilitation are often inter-dependent. More generally, theory and research on desistance, resettlement, rehabilitation, reentry and re/integration all refer to the salience of social reaction for life after punishment. In this chapter, relying on findings from a recent participative study of men’s post-prison re/integration in Glasgow, we further develop understandings of the importance of social reaction in processes of rehabilitation and re/integration. We do so primarily by exploring two specific and contrasting local examples of social reaction to returning prisoners in Glasgow, Scotland. The first concerns the stigmatising, degrading and inefficient process of seeking support from a Community Homeless Service. The second concerns the re/integrative, empowering and supportive process of entering, becoming part of and contributing to a community called ‘A Place to Change’. Our exploration of these two contrasting examples reveals how the ways in which these services engage with punished people is shaped by and affects other domains of their re/integration, such as the material, the judicial-legal, the personal, the civic-political and the moral. From this analysis, we develop and propose a six-form model of re/integration that supports but extends current models, highlighting the interactive and temporal character of this phenomenon.
