Ladies of Lost Causes

<p>In this highly original study Judith Rumgay evaluates the development of a residential programme for female offenders run by the Griffins Society. The text is unique in that it documents the radical contribution of women philanthropists and practitioners to offender rehabilitation. </p><p>Drawing on archival interview and observational sources the author describes analyses and evaluates a distinctive model of care provision by volunteer upper-middle-class women that has since been overtaken by the professionalization of the voluntary sector. Rumgay illuminates the pathways of women into and out of serious crime; explores the dynamics of rehabilitative practice in the volatile setting of residential care; and also analyses the qualities of successful rehabilitative practice. </p><p>Subsequently the author suggests rehabilitative success is more appropriately understood within a paradigm of natural desistance from crime instead of the more common appeal to a medical model of treatment. Moreover this style of rehabilitative practice is inextricable from the broader social outlook of a dedicated group of philanthropic women whose critics derided them with epithets such as 'Lady Bountiful'.</p>