The Gifted Criminal: Education as Risk, Resilience and Rehabilitation

This presentation is based on research in collaboration between pedagogy and criminology and consists of a policy analysis of educational options for people in Swedish prisons. The results show that inmates can be offered further, or even higher education, as part of their rehabilitation but these are strongly limited to a low expectation on their ability. The key question is to what extent gifted criminals, in the process of turning their lives around, face the same failure to recognise their abilities in education as perhaps drove them towards criminality in the first place.