Multiculturalism, Morality, and Secondary Secularisation: CoSA or Common Good in Practice

Society, Sex Offenders, And The Rehabilitation Challenge

The prison population consists of more than 400,000 people in Europe and around 85,000 in the UK (Walmsley, 2015). Prison is a singular environment and national penal policies have to address issues as diverse as the population’s feeling of insecurity, the need for justice, sentencing options, and routes to rehabilitation. The abolition of the death penalty led to new policies, legal apparatus and sentences to control offenders population, such as national registration (and in several countries public disclosure), or new form of life sentence (under specified conditions, see section 225 Criminal Justice Act 2003). Sex offenders are a particular type of such offenders, given the nature of their act and social perception (Frost, 2010). How can a society compromise between safety, security (maintaining social cohesion) and the human rights of (sex) offenders (Boutellier, 2011)? Does the oscillation between rehabilitation, desistance process¹ (Farral and Caverley, 2006) and risk management (Bonta, 2002) rely on facts, science or beliefs (Harcourt, 2007, 2010)?