Reframing rehabilitation: the REACT model for measuring human change

Contemporary correctional assessment practices prioritize the prediction of institutional and recidivism risk, often rewarding behavioral compliance while offering limited capacity to recognize internal psychological, moral, or identity-based change. This article introduces REACT (Reentry Evaluation for Actual Change and Transformation), a theoretically grounded, unvalidated developmental framework designed to assess readiness for reintegration across five domains: Psychological Readiness, Relational Anchoring, Cognitive Integrity, Identity Ownership, and Structural Navigation. Drawing on cognitive transformation theory and desistance research, REACT responds to the absence of structured approaches for examining constructs such as self-authorship, moral reckoning, and prosocial identity development within existing evaluation regimes. Unlike actuarial instruments (e.g., COMPAS, ORAS), which estimate risk primarily from historical and external indicators, REACT is proposed as a complementary framework for discerning trajectories of internal change and informing intervention planning. The model operationalizes dimensions of agency, narrative coherence, and identity reconstruction without presuming uniform pathways to rehabilitation or discounting structural contributors to criminal justice involvement. Implications are discussed for parole decision-making, reentry programming, and future empirical validation, including reliability testing, construct refinement, and equity assessment.