Deconstructing the Panacea of Volunteering in Criminal Justice

Corcoran, Mary and Grotz, Jurgen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6285-0815 (2016) Deconstructing the Panacea of Volunteering in Criminal Justice. In: The Voluntary Sector and Criminal Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp. 93-116. ISBN 978-1-349-57862-7

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Abstract

The announcement in November 2012 by the Minister of Justice of plans to recruit volunteering organisations as indispensable to his ‘rehabilitation revolution’ crystallised several favoured policy themes of the coalition government. The speech confirmed the special status that voluntary sector organisations (VSOs) had assumed in governmental thinking about resettling and managing offenders. The proposition that civic-minded volunteers could salvage offenders from lives of crime on a widespread scale was fêted as an idea whose time had come. That appeal resonated with the Big Society project, which promulgated the idea that civil society could play an important, and sometimes more successful, role than the state in tackling entrenched social problems, including crime (Norman, 2010). Within this paradigm, it is claimed that properly trained members of the community and even former lawbreakers are singularly well placed to help offenders to turn their lives around where the prisons and probation system are deemed to have failed (Carter, 2003; Le Grand, 2007). However, underlying the appeal to socially responsible citizenship was the more sombre warning that discharging offenders back to homelessness, social isolation or substance addiction without help would perpetuate their reoffending, to the eventual cost of public safety: Solving these problems requires a radically different approach. Our central objective is to make the public safer by breaking the cycle of crime. (Ministry of Justice, 2010: 7, s15)

Item Type: Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords: sdg 3 - good health and well-being,sdg 16 - peace, justice and strong institutions ,/dk/atira/pure/sustainabledevelopmentgoals/good_health_and_well_being
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > School of Health Sciences
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Groups > Dementia & Complexity in Later Life
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Depositing User: Pure Connector
Date Deposited: 27 May 2016 14:00
Last Modified: 21 Oct 2022 05:30
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/59112
DOI: 10.1057/9781137370679_5

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