Reforming or hardening? What Ghana's senior correctional centre means for formerly incarcerated young people

Rehabilitation is a central but contested objective of contemporary punishment. Drawing on rehabilitation, labelling, and life course theories, this study examines the lived experiences of formerly incarcerated young people from Ghana's Senior Correctional Centre. The research investigates whether the centre reforms or hardens individuals. The findings challenge the binary framing of punishment as either rehabilitative or punitive, demonstrating that carceral spaces produce contingent and divergent outcomes. Three interrelated experiential patterns are identified: rehabilitative or transformative experiences, associated with education, vocational training, reflection, and supportive staff relationships; punitive or criminogenic experiences, characterised by survivalism, mistrust, emotional hardening, and informal peer-based criminal learning; and ambivalent experiences, where rehabilitative opportunities coexist with criminogenic institutional cultures. By analysing post-release narratives from a Global South context, this article advances critical punishment scholarship on carceral power, subjectivity, and identity change. 1