About the project
The RaRiE project investigates how rehabilitation in “progressive” and inclusion-oriented penal systems functions in practice, and whether it fulfils its ideals or unintentionally causes harm. Its goal is to critically assess the development, contradictions and real impacts of rehabilitation using a new approach called Dialogical Comparative Penology.
By creating new evaluative tools and engaging with practitioners and people with lived experience, the project aims to improve the fairness and effectiveness of European penal systems.
Objectives
This project aims to produce a uniquely comprehensive, critical and comparative analysis of the nature and impact of rehabilitation in three European nations: the Netherlands, Norway and Scotland. By so doing, it aims to drive forward both the study of rehabilitation and the development of Dialogical Comparative Penology (DCP), as well as reshaping academic, policy and practice debates about how rehabilitation should be defined and understood, and whether and how it should be further developed.
Professor Ugelvik will head the Norwegian part of the RaRiE project.
Background
A clearer picture of what rehabilitation ought to involve does not reveal how it actually unfolds in daily practice or how it is experienced by the people subject to it. Contemporary rehabilitation is shaped by competing interests and is continuously contested across multiple arenas—from political debate and public discourse to prisons, treatment settings and probation offices. To understand it fully, we must examine these struggles over meaning as they play out on the ground.
Emerging ethnographic evidence highlights the everyday pressures, pains and constraints that people encounter when navigating rehabilitative requirements, as well as the personal adjustments they feel compelled to make. At the same time, creative, experience-focused research has shown that rehabilitation can support desistance and reintegration, yet can also leave people feeling constrained, misrecognised or suspended in uncertainty.
The RaRIE project builds on these insights by advancing an approach that centres moral recognition and dialogue, both as essential principles for legitimate and effective rehabilitation and as guiding commitments for how the research itself will be conducted.
