Rehabilitation frames: How offenders understand and navigate the penal-welfare nexus in Chinese community corrections

Adopting an offender-centric approach, this paper advances the understanding of the enactment of the rehabilitation ideal inscribed in the newly established Chinese community corrections (CCC). Building on conceptual tools from cultural criminology/sociology, we introduce the concept of “rehabilitation frames” to capture the multifaceted perceptions of and experiences with the CCC’s rehabilitation services. These frames are the interpretive structures and processes through which offenders understand their participation in the CCC, conceive individualized treatment from service professionals, and organize their responses to fulfill compliance requirements. Using ethnographic data, mainly from interviews with participants, gleaned from urban community corrections in China, we identify three main rehabilitation frames: rehabilitation-as-antidote, rehabilitation-as-affirmation, and rehabilitation-as-inception. These frames collectively assemble offenders’ ambivalent experiences into coherent dynamics related to their enrollment in rehabilitation. Our findings underscore the significance of agentic, dynamic, and relational perspectives on the rehabilitation aspiration within the evolving CCC.