ABSTRACT
This chapter endeavours to emphasise the centrality of rehabilitation to the APAC mission. We have seen that prisoners' lives are micro-managed to the finest detail. APAC prisons depart from Foucault's analysis of the panoptic institution only in the sense that the 'judges of normality' are not professionals, but ordinary members of the prison community. The APAC methodology takes state abandonment of prisoners as its starting point. It aims to rescue inmates from the common prison system, where they are treated as being beyond reform. Its vision is of community self-governance, not state-governance, of communityled reintegration rather than state-led exclusion. APAC prisons can be described as self-governing in the sense that inmates and local people participate in administering them in order to facilitate rehabilitation rather than survival, more specifically to facilitate prisoner self-help. Here the concept of recoverers helping recoverers comes to the fore.
