| The thesis examines ex-inmates' self-report accounts of their experience with reintegration. In order to arrive at an understanding of this social stage, the labelling approach is used as a broad theoretical framework to develop a typology for understanding the different ways in which stigma is experienced and managed by ex-inmates with different criminal histories and life situations. While the study recognizes the social barriers to reintegration and the problems that every ex-inmate experiences because of social stigma, an important facet of this work is to understand that there are distinct personal, criminal, institutional, and social patterns of the stigma experience and management which can be identified within three ex-offender categories: the career criminal, the occasional criminal, and the episodic or one time offender. The understanding of distinct reintegration needs, based on these categorizations, will assist community corrections in matching ex-offender profiles to the appropriate intensity for community correctional programme delivery, and release criteria to assure that the ex-inmate receives the best fit, based on his profile to become a law-abiding citizen. |
