Designing rehabilitative prison environments
Project start and end dates
2023 --
Research team members
Background and aims of the project
Is it possible to create the conditions conducive to rehabilitation in a closed, custodial environment? Surprisingly little effort has gone into answering this question in a holistic manner. Much is known about barriers to rehabilitation: overcrowded prisons, lack of prison programmes, or programmes of poor quality; prison violence and the poor ‘penal climate’ of fear and distrust that follows with it, as examples. But effective rehabilitative prison environments are not merely the flip side of poor ones: reducing overcrowding, for example, is a necessary but in no way sufficient condition for effective rehabilitation. It is only recently that prisons researchers have begun to piece together the essential characteristics of an effective rehabilitative prison.
The project aims to better understand and develop policy and practice guidance on conditions conducive to effective rehabilitation in prison. It is being undertaken with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime and in 2023 completed small field research studies in England, Nigeria and South Africa.