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2021 Abstracts Stage 3

Norway’s Halden prison: an argument for rehabilitation

This project’s aim is to explore Norway’s Halden Prison and look at whether or not its ethos of rehabilitation is a success in being the core function of prisons. The three primary texts that I will be using are Michel Foucault’s (2020) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, John Rawls’ Theory of Justice and Thomas Hobbes’ Social Contract Theory, in his Leviathon. I begin by looking at the historical shift of punishment as retribution (punishment of the body) towards punishment as rehabilitation (the reforming of the soul) (Foucault, 2020, p.7). From here, I move onto the two chapters that consist of the bulk of the project, the first focusing on rehabilitation and discussing the tension between whether it benefits the society or the individual. In the second chapter, I look at Foucault and Davis, who are problematising the idea that people are made into becoming a criminal—their problem is that often, ‘criminals’ are not actually ‘criminals’ and often do not need to be rehabilitated or corrected.