Imprisonment and Meaningful Work

John Austin Seminars - Imprisonment and Meaningful Work:

A Framework for Habilitation 

Speaker: Dr. Hadassa Noorda, Assistant Professor, University of Amsterdam 

Chair: George Letsas, Professor of Philosophy of Law, UCL Laws 

About the Seminar:

This event will explore a framework for considering work in prison based on societal inclusion, advocating for a standard of meaningful work for incarcerated individuals. Traditionally, scholarship on prison labour has been framed through retributive or rehabilitative perspectives, which justify the state's right to deprive individuals of societal participation or focus on preparing them for reintegration after release.

However, many incarcerated individuals have never played a meaningful role in society prior to imprisonment. Lacking access to skills training, stable employment, and social networks, they often face exclusion even before entering the prison system. As a result, incarceration impacts individuals who were already marginalized, further deepening their societal exclusion.
This event will introduce habilitationism—an alternative approach to criminal law that argues punishment should enhance an individual's ability to participate in society rather than further exclude them. From this perspective, incarcerated individuals are entitled to societal participation as much as—if not more than—other members of society. To achieve this, access to meaningful work opportunities during incarceration is essential.

Join us as we discuss how habilitationism challenges conventional perspectives on prison labour and explore the role of meaningful work in fostering inclusion, skill-building, and long-term reintegration into society.

About the Speaker: 

Dr. Hadassa Noorda is an Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam and serves on the organizing committee of the Legal Philosophy Workshop. Specializing in the philosophy of law, her primary research interests lie in criminal law theory. Dr. Noorda holds degrees in both law and philosophy from the University of Amsterdam and Columbia University (LL.B., LL.M., BA, MA, PhD). She has held several postdoctoral positions, including the Dworkin Balzan Fellowship and Global Hauser Fellowship at NYU, a research fellowship at Columbia Law School, and a Rubicon Fellowship at Rutgers’ Institute for Law and Philosophy, supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). In 2023-2024, she was a GAK Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS). Her work has been published in leading journals, such as the Modern Law Review and Criminal Law and Philosophy. 

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