Advancing Corrections Journal - Edition #20 - Scholarly Reflections on Core Considerations for Correctional Practice| Article 20 (ACJ20-A020)

Article 20: Belonging, Desistance and Corrections (ACJ20-A020) by Fergus McNeill and Marguerite Schinkel

Abstract

This short paper explains the development and importance of the concept of tertiary (or relational) desistance, which relates to securing acceptance and belonging in a community after criminalisation and punishment. The paper presents evidence from a range of recent studies that have studied tertiary desistance empirically, before going on to discuss the implications for correctional policy and practice.

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Authors

Fergus McNeill

Professor of Criminology & Social Work, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom

Fergus McNeill is Professor of Criminology and Social Work at the University of Glasgow. Prior to becoming an academic in 1998, Fergus worked for a decade in residential drug rehabilitation and as a criminal justice social worker.

His research projects and publications have focused mainly on institutions, cultures and practices of punishment, rehabilitation and reintegration. As well exploring how increasingly knowledge about desistance from crime might re-shape rehabilitation and reintegration (both within and beyond criminal justice), Fergus’s work has increasingly used creative and ethnographic methods to better understand how criminal justice is experienced, both by those subject to it and by those whose job is to try to realise it in practice. From January 2026-December 2030, he will lead a major 5-year study, funded by the European Research Council’s Advanced Grants scheme, of ‘Rehabilitation and Reintegration in Europe’ (RaRiE), working with colleagues in the Universities of Leiden (Miranda Boone and Hilde Wermink) and Oslo (Thomas Ugelvik).

Fergus’s 2018 book, ‘Pervasive Punishment: Making sense of mass supervision’, was the winner of the European Society of Criminology’s book prize. His next book, co-edited with Mary Corcoran and Beth Weaver), ‘Generative Justice: Beyond crime and punishment’, is due for publication by Bristol University Press in January 2026.

Marguerite Schinkel

Senior Lecturer in Criminology, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom

Marguerite is a senior lecturer in Criminology and a member of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research. She joined the University of Glasgow in October 2013 as an ESRC Future Leader Research Fellow. In the past, her research has focused on the meaning of long-term (PhD) and repeated short-term prison sentences (post-doc) for those who undergo them. She found that long sentences have to be accepted in order to cope with them, and are sometimes given transformative meanings in order to explain a positive future. Persistent short sentences, on the other hand, are not individually meaningful, but people serving them come to feel they belong in prison and that they have wasted their lives. Marguerite has also studied the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on punishment in Scotland, as co-stream lead on criminal justice, part of a wider research project at the University of Glasgow. Her monograph 'Being Imprisoned', based on her PhD, was published in 2014. More recently, Marguerite has worked with an artist and Modern Studies teachers to develop a graphic novel and learning resource based on her research: A Life In Pieces - SCCJR.

Before starting her PhD, Marguerite worked as a support assistant in L'Arche Vancouver, as a mental health support worker in Edinburgh, and as a researcher, including for the Criminal Justice Social Work Development Centre for Scotland.

Advancing Corrections Journal - Edition #20 - Scholarly Reflections on Core Considerations for Correctional Practice| Article 20 (ACJ20-A020)

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