ABSTRACT
Offenders’ families often play an important role in rehabilitating offenders. They can provide valuable social capital and emotional, practical, and financial support. This chapter will outline the existing empirical evidence as to the utility of family links in rehabilitation and contextualize it within the current socio-political climate. It will also outline the complexities surrounding family links in this context. Not all families may be helpful when it comes to rehabilitation; some may have been collusive in offending and others may not be practically or financially able to help the offender. Moreover, offenders’ families themselves experience numerous social, political, and financial injustices, and therefore care needs to be taken when implying that they have some indirect responsibility for helping the offender’s rehabilitation efforts.
