ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses specifically on the personal dimensions of rehabilitation. It explores how and why people move away from offending and towards an improved social position. It also considers what sorts of rehabilitative approaches and services might best support that journey. In reviewing and analysing the research findings and conceptualisations about desistance, this chapter synthesises personal rehabilitation in the context of the main themes of this book which allows the location of the overall rehabilitative endeavour within a model of social integration and social justice. Utilising Bottoms and Shapland’s (2011) Seven-Step Desistance Process, the authors then outline the similarities and differences between offence-focused and desistance-focused practice and contrast probation practice across four paradigms – Non-Treatment, Revised, What Works? and Desistance. Ultimately, the authors argue that penal power may be able to do some good if it can constructively build (or repair) relations of social solidarity; where it seeks only to coerce personal change, it is more likely to do harm.
