From “rehabilitation” to “assisted desistance”: Transcending the medical model
The concept of rehabilitation is sometimes contrasted with the idea of spontaneous or natural desistance from crime. In this essay, I argue that both these concepts are based in a medical model of understanding change that is not consistent with what is known about how the process of desistance actually works. Both rehabilitation and spontaneous desistance should be understood in a more nuanced and integrative way, as in the assisted desistance or co-produced desistance rhetoric used in British desistance research.