Presenter:
A/P Narayanan Ganapathy
Assistant Dean – Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Associate Professor - Department of Sociology

Time: 4pm to 5:30pm
Registration starts at 3:30pm and light refreshments will be provided

Venue: Research Division Seminar Room (AS7 06-42)
Address: Shaw Foundation Building, National University of Singapore
5 Arts Link, Singapore 117570

Abstract:
The social reintegration of ex-offenders into the community has emerged as one of the key concerns of the criminal justice system globally as prison populations in most countries have risen rapidly over the past decade with a concomitant rise in the numbers of releases (Scott & Codd, 2010). High recidivism rates indicate that many ex-prisoners have not benefitted from the rehabilitative process during incarceration and thus are not successful in their reintegration into society (Petersilia, 2003). While rehabilitation and reintegration are often treated as interchangeable concepts in the political and in much of the positivist academic discourses, such conflation raises methodological and theoretical issues which are often glossed over in the narratives. The objectives of this paper are threefold: first, to highlight the theoretical differences between rehabilitation, which is largely psychological in focus, and reintegration, which is mainly social in nature; second, to demonstrate the ways in which the dominance of the psychological paradigm of risk management and reduction, as seen in the “risk-needs-responsivity” model, mitigates reintegration efforts within the penal context; and third, to make a case for “restorative detention”, notwithstanding the internal contradiction the term connotes.

Presenter’s profile:
Narayanan Ganapathy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. He is concurrently an Assistant Dean at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Prof Ganapathy’s research and teaching interests are criminology, sociology of crime and deviance, sociology of law and policing, juvenile justice, criminal gangs and domestic violence. Prof Ganapathy has published extensively in various international journals and is a member of the Editorial Boards of The European Journal of Criminology, The Asian Journal of Criminology and The International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice.

Prof Ganapathy sits on the ministerial committees of the Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of Social and Family Development, Ministry of Defence, and Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth. He is also a Member of the National Council Against Drug Abuse, and the Indian Community Aftercare Council. Prof Ganapathy is the Chairman of the HEB-Ashram Halfway House, a role he undertakes in his capacity as a member of the Hindu Endowments Board.