Rehabilitation as Presented in British Film: Shining a Light on Desistance from Crime?

Abstract

Abstract: Violent crime is one of the great subjects of world cinema; and oblique appeals for social reform – especially, for example, vis‐à‐vis capital punishment – also play a role in countless scores of films. However, explicit studies on the nature of self‐reform and the professional social services which might help effect it are few and far between. While still keeping an eye on the broader international context, in this article we examine four British films – I Believe in You; The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner; A Sense of Freedom; and McVicar – each of which is notable for the unusual directness of its comments on how people deal with the problems of rehabilitation and desistance. Only one film dramatises formalised social work intervention, but they all reflect what might be described as a natural process of rehabilitation aided by the influence of significant others and all touch on psychological theories about causation and cure. Apart from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which is a forensic, if fictional, account of how reform programmes go wrong, these films show very clearly that individual change is an incremental, often imperceptible, process of increasing self‐awareness, motivation and self‐challenge. They also show that, while this process can be helped along by professional intervention, it is often dependent on the accruing of social capital and movement through stages of life familiar to us all. In this context, we argue that, despite the limited attention given by British film to the subject of rehabilitation, it has nevertheless produced some surprisingly accurate reflections of how desistance works.