Professor Fergus McNeill Awarded Prestigious ERC Advanced Grants

SCCJR’s Professor Fergus McNeill, University of Glasgow, has been awarded a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant to fund a new project called Rehabilitation and Reintegration in Europe (RaRiE).

Until recently, the study of penal systems has focused mainly on their most severe or repressive features, but these systems often do great harm when aiming to do good, not least by expanding the scale, reach and intensity of penal control.

By examining evidence from three countries that are often considered ‘progressive’ (the Netherlands, Norway and Scotland), RaRiE will promote better understand whether and where rehabilitation lives up to its ideals, and to creatively, critically and comparatively interrogate its development and prospects, its coherences and contradictions, its rhetoric and its realities, its pitfalls and its possibilities.

Professor McNeill, of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, said: “I am so delighted to receive this grant. I’ve spent the last few decades trying to understand and improve rehabilitation and reintegration in one way or another. Building on everything I’ve learned in my previous work – from a huge range of collaborators past and present – we’ll be using creative and dialogical methods that allow our project participants to share the task of reimagining justice and how we can better deliver it. And we’ll build capacity while we do it, not just with new researchers, but in the communities of place, practice and interest that will be involved in Scotland, the Netherlands and Norway.”

The new grant is part of the EU’s Horizon Europe programme.

To find our who the other successful awardees are from the University of Glasgow visit the website.