Speakers
Plenary Session
Contemporary correctional systems are increasingly asked to reduce reliance on imprisonment while promoting rehabilitation, reintegration, and community safety. Yet policy and practice often continue to be organised around the individual offender as the primary unit of analysis and intervention. Drawing on more than two decades of research on families affected by crime and punishment, this presentation proposes a relational approach that places families, relationships and communities at the centre of thinking about punishment and reintegration. Individuals in conflict 1 with the law are not isolated units of risk, need, responsibility or rehabilitation. Research has consistently shown that the harms of punishment flow through kin relationships and are more than ‘collateral’. The presentation extends earlier work on these ‘symbiotic harms’ (Condry and Minson, 2020) to consider the relational aspects of reintegration, the meaning of family and relationships in diverse social and cultural contexts, and key principles for a meaningful relational approach in a modern corrections landscape. If correctional systems are to reduce reliance on imprisonment safely and humanely, they need to understand ‘family’ not just as a rehabilitative resource, but as part of the social ecology through which punishment is experienced, mitigated, reproduced and potentially transformed.