Rehabilitation, Fairytales and Realities
Talk by Professor Fergus McNeill, University of Glasgow.
Fergus McNeill is Professor of Criminology and Social Work at the University of Glasgow. Prior to becoming an academic in 1998, Fergus worked for a decade in residential drug rehabilitation and as a criminal justice social worker.
His research projects and publications have focused mainly on institutions, cultures and practices of punishment, rehabilitation and reintegration. As well as exploring how increasingly knowledge about desistance from crime might re-shape rehabilitation and reintegration (both within and beyond criminal justice), Fergus’s work has increasingly used creative and ethnographic methods to better understand how criminal justice is experienced, both by those subject to it and by those whose job is to try to realise it in practice.
From January 2026-December 2030, Fergus is leading a major 5-year study, funded by the European Research Council’s Advanced Grants scheme, of ‘Rehabilitation and Reintegration in Europe’ (RaRiE), working with colleagues in the Universities of Leiden (Miranda Boone and Hilde Wermink) and Oslo (Thomas Ugelvik).
Fergus’s book, ‘Pervasive Punishment: Making sense of mass supervision’, was the winner of the European Society of Criminology’s book prize in 2021. His latest book (co-edited with Mary Corcoran and Beth Weaver), ‘Generative Justice: Beyond crime and punishment’, was published by Bristol University Press in January 2026.