Resettlement, Reintegration and Desistance in Europe

Abstract

This chapter explores the implications of the different aims and approaches to prisoner resettlement in the European jurisdictions examined in this book, considered in the light of research about desistance from crime and how it appears to be best supported. The first section briefly synthesises parts of the country chapters in this collection to illustrate a range of aims of and approaches to resettlement. In providing this partial and illustrative synthesis, we do not claim any expertise in the justice systems of the countries profiled in this collection. Instead, reading into our colleagues’ accounts, we reflect not just on explicit aims and formal structures of resettlement but also on what may be inferred as its implicit or latent aims and informal structures. What language and terminology is used? What themes emerge from how resettlement and re/integration are constructed and supported in different ways in different places? The second section draws upon contemporary desistance scholarship, using previous work (both our own and others and, in particular, Graham and McNeill, 2017; McNeill, 2012; McNeill and Schinkel, 2016) to consider the implications of these different constructions of resettlement for re/integration and desistance from crime. Notions of citizenship and belonging are central to our understanding of these two processes (resettlement and desistance) in which personal capabilities, social relations, structural conditions and legal rights play key roles (see Graham, 2016; Graham et al., 2015; McNeill, 2016; Weaver, 2016).