Promoting 'Good Lives': A New Framework for Offender Rehabilitation

Narrative

Traditionally offender rehabilitation has been understood as a top-down process through which deficits are ‘corrected’. Maruna is the primary source of a ‘strengths-based’ or ‘good lives’ approach to rehabilitation. This is based on his research into how individuals successfully desist from crime of their own volition. The reach and significance of Maruna’s research is demonstrated by surveys of those professionals involved in rehabilitation which suggest that this approach now underpins the practice of up to one quarter of treatment interventions internationally (McGrath et al 2010). The US Department of Justice (2011) has recently funded a $1.5 million pilot test of “desistance theory” explicitly “based on Maruna’s trans-theoretical model”. This approach has also been widely adopted in England and Wales.

Impact status	Ongoing
Category of impact	Societial Impact