THE problem of reintegrating released prisoners may be among our society’s most challenging issues. Nearly three prisoners out of five reoffend within two years of release, costing society an estimated £11 billion a year.

The answer is to improve the provision of rehabilitation for prisoners. Yet the history of such interventions is a long series of failed remedies. With that in mind, I cast my vote for a new rehabilitative cure: wheelchairs.

Before I explain, we should ask why our efforts to rehabilitate offenders so routinely fail? Some blame prisoners themselves. They are just irredeemably wicked, damaged or corrupt. Others put the blame on the justice system. Prisons are schools of crime that make bad people worse. But what if the problem of reoffending has little to do with either of these and is instead a problem of society itself?

The criminologist Jock Young has argued that we live in a “bulimic society”, one in which all of us are socialised to “worship money, wealth and status” and yet most are “systematically excluded from its realisation”.

If this is right, what good would it do to reintegrate prisoners into the mainstream when it is precisely such mainstream values that led them to crime in the first place?

This is where wheelchairs come in. Organisations such as CSV and the Inside Out Trust provide volunteering opportunities to prisoners near the end of their sentences. As part of these long-term volunteer placements, prisoners provide respite care, staff charity shops and repair wheelchairs. Such good works do not appear to be proper rehabilitation as viewed through the narrow lens of accredited programmes but they may be among the most useful opportunities available in prisons.

The benefits of volunteer work include an improved sense of self-worth, accomplishment and purpose. Unlike accredited interventions, such as anger management or thinking skills programmes, volunteer work puts the offender in the dignified position of being a help-giver rather than a passive help-receiver. Volunteering also sends a message to the community that the offender deserves further support and investment in his or her reintegration. Yet the real virtue of volunteerism might be its reversal of our bulimic value system.

I have done volunteer work in prisons and prisoners never cease to be amazed. “Why would you do this for free?” they say, as if simply enjoying such work is utterly outside their understanding of the world. The same reaction can be found among members of the public on hearing of prisoners who volunteer for charity. “They must be trying to impress a parole board. There has to be some angle.” And, for some, there is. But other CSV volunteers, inside and outside prisons, know better.

Many prisoners struggle to find a sense of meaning in their lives. They seek to fill empty lives with cocaine binges, joy rides and violence. Some find they can fill this void equally well with creative writing, raising children or even volunteering. This is how rehabilitation works.

Or maybe not. If volunteer work fails as a panacea — as has every other magic bullet in offender rehabilitation — at least the world will have more respite care and more repaired wheelchairs.

Dr Shadd Maruna is a criminologist at Queen’s University, Belfast, and delivers CSV’s annual Edith Kahn lecture at the House of Lords tonight

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