Dr Victoria Knight – Digital Rehabilitation and the Limits of Technology in Criminal Justice
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In this episode of the IN-CJ podcast, Rob Watson is joined by Dr Victoria Knight, Associate Professor at De Montfort University, to explore a set of increasingly urgent questions about the role of digital technology in criminal justice systems. The conversation sits at the intersection of rehabilitation, digital inclusion, institutional culture, and international practice, and reflects on what is gained and what may be lost as prisons, probation, and courts adopt new technological tools at speed.
Dr Knight’s research has long focused on the use of mass communication and digital technologies in custodial settings. Drawing on recent work undertaken with UNICRI, and comparative research across jurisdictions including the UK, Europe, Namibia, Thailand, and Australia, she brings a grounded and critical perspective to current debates around what is often described as “digital rehabilitation.”
A central theme of the discussion is the idea that neither “prison” nor “rehabilitation” are fixed or universally agreed concepts. They are shaped by culture, history, political priorities, and institutional practice. When technology is introduced into these already contested spaces, it does not arrive as a neutral tool. It carries assumptions about efficiency, behaviour change, risk management, and what success should look like. One of the key concerns raised in the conversation is that digital systems are often developed and deployed faster than the evidence base needed to assess their longer-term impacts on people, staff, and institutions.
The podcast reflects on how digital technologies can support education, communication, and continuity of care, particularly when people move between custody and the community. At the same time, it raises questions about digital exclusion. Many people who come into contact with the criminal justice system have limited access to technology, low levels of digital confidence, or a history of avoidance due to surveillance, criminalisation, or past harm. Introducing digital systems without adequate support risks deepening existing inequalities rather than addressing them.
A particularly important strand of the discussion focuses on staff. Technology is often framed as a solution to overstretched services, staff shortages, and rising caseloads. However, Dr Knight emphasises that the attitudes, confidence, and competencies of staff are central to whether technology supports or undermines rehabilitative goals. Systems designed primarily around efficiency can unintentionally deskill professional judgement, narrow relationships to data points, and create distance between practitioners and lived experience.
The conversation also explores cultural specificity. What works in one jurisdiction may not translate easily to another. For example, models of digital education that assume individualised, self-directed learning may conflict with cultures where learning is understood as collective and relational. The podcast cautions against exporting technological models across borders without attention to local meaning, practice, and social context.
Artificial intelligence emerges as a further area of concern and curiosity. As criminal justice agencies increasingly experiment with AI-supported decision-making, assessment, and monitoring, the discussion asks what this means for accountability, discretion, and trust. If data-driven systems are privileged over human testimony, how do we ensure that complexity, vulnerability, and change remain visible? What happens to the definition of rehabilitation if success is measured primarily through quantifiable outputs rather than lived outcomes?
The podcast also situates criminal justice within a wider social trend of “datafication,” where systems increasingly rely on metrics, dashboards, and performance indicators. Drawing parallels with health and education, Dr Knight suggests that there is much to learn from other sectors that have already experienced rapid digital transformation, including the unintended consequences and ethical tensions that followed.
Throughout the discussion, there is a recurring warning against viewing technology as a fix for fundamentally human problems. Prisons and probation services are dealing with people with complex histories of trauma, exclusion, ill health, and social harm. Technology can support communication, access, and continuity, but it cannot replace relationships, trust, reflection, or care. When introduced without sufficient critical reflection, it risks contributing to processes of dehumanisation rather than rehabilitation.
The podcast also looks ahead to the forthcoming IN-CJ and Probation Institute webinar on digital rehabilitation, which brings together international researchers working on digital exclusion, vulnerability, and recovery. Rather than offering simple answers, the conversation acknowledges complexity and uncertainty. It invites practitioners, researchers, and policymakers to slow down, ask better questions, and centre lived experience alongside innovation.
This episode will be of interest to anyone working in criminal justice policy, practice, research, or education who is grappling with the rapid expansion of digital systems. It offers a timely reminder that technological change is always social change, and that the challenge is not whether to use technology, but how to do so in ways that remain ethical, humane, and attentive to difference.
The full podcast conversation with Dr Victoria Knight is available via the IN-CJ website and podcast channels. Readers are also encouraged to explore the accompanying webinar series and related discussions hosted by the network, which continue to open space for international, reflective dialogue on the future of criminal justice.
