Criminalisation, criminal records and rehabilitation: From supervision to citizenship?

Abstract

Scholars of criminal justice have long described contact with the penal system as involving different forms of ‘pain’. Paradigmatically, Sykes (1958) outlined the ‘pains of imprisonment’ whereby the incarcerated experience deprivations of liberty, autonomy, security, goods and services, and heterosexual relationships. Subsequently, Crewe (2011) described 21st century imprisonment as involving pains associated with indeterminacy, psychological assessment and selfgovernment in his analysis of the ‘depth’, ‘weight’ and ‘tightness’ of the contemporary prison experience. However, the notion of a ‘painful’ criminal justice experience has not been limited to studies of incarceration. Durnescu (2011, 2019) applied Sykes’ approach to non-custodial supervision, suggesting that amongst other ‘pains of probation’ or ‘re-entry’ were the sense of instability or ‘walking on thin ice’, the uncomfortable aspects of being forced to return to and confront one’s offending, and the stigmatisation effects of the juridical status of the probationer. Hayes (2015) has also considered the various ‘pains of community penalties’, noting how supervision may involve an intrusive and, in some cases, hostile degree of intervention by various agencies in the lives of lawbreakers. In addition to this more established focus amongst academics on imprisonment and community punishment, increasing attention is now being paid to so-called ‘collateral consequences’ of a criminal record. These ‘invisible punishments’ (Travis, 2002) include numerous de jure provisions and de facto practices which involve people with criminal records being treated less favourably than others in a wide range of life domains outside of the sphere of criminal justice and often long after the completion of their sentences. Scholarship in this field has focused predominantly on the United States where many thousands of laws exist restricting rights in areas such as employment, housing, participation in democracy and access to social security (see inter alia Corda, 2018; Jacobs, 2015; Kirk and Wakefield, 2018). However, greater focus is now starting to be placed on discriminatory practices against people with criminal records in Europe (Kurtovic and Rovira, 2017; Larrauri and Rovira, 2018) and to how this might be tackled (Henley, 2019; Larrauri, 2014a). Editorial The Journal of Community and Criminal Justice