Rehabilitation (criminal)

Definition: Punishment designed to reform offenders so they can lead productive lives free from crime

Significance: While rehabilitation may be the most humane and progressive form of punishment, it is also the most difficult to achieve and waned in popularity in the American justice system after the 1970s.

Although rehabilitation is often considered a type of punishment for criminal offenders, its objectives are therapeutic rather than punitive. While some theories of punishment claim that criminals deserve to suffer for their crimes, the rehabilitative ideal views criminal behavior more as a disease that should be treated with scientific methods to cure offenders.

Many convicts suffer from mental and physical illnesses, drug addictions, and limited opportunities for economic success, and these problems increase their likelihood of recidivism. If the justice system simply incarcerates offenders to make them “pay their debt to society,” they are likely to reenter it with all the problems that drive them to crime still in place. Moreover, they will also need to contend with the additional handicap of having a criminal record. They will also be older and still without marketable skills or education, their social relationships are likely to have deteriorated, and incarceration itself may have acclimated them to criminal culture. Thus incarcerating offenders can actually make them more likely than before to commit offenses after they are released. High rates of recidivism attest to this. A rehabilitative approach to punishment attempts to treat the underlying causes of criminals’ transgressions so they can return to society to become productive citizens. Instead of exacting revenge against criminals and making their lives even worse, rehabilitation tries to help them.

Early American prisons, such as those established at Auburn and Ossining, New York, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during the 1820s, implemented rehabilitative principles. These early programs isolated convicts from one another in order to remove them from the temptations that had driven them to crime and to provide individual inmates with time to listen to their own consciences and reflect on their deeds. Those early systems, like the Auburn system, were predicated on the belief that all convicts would return to their inherently good natures when removed from the corrupting influences of society. However, those beliefs eventually gave way to more aggressive forms of treatment informed by the rise of social scientific studies into criminal behavior.

Rehabilitative Theories

Research in psychology, criminology, and sociology provided reformers with deeper understandings of deviance and sharper tools with which to treat it. Rehabilitation then became a science of reeducating criminals with the values, attitudes, and skills necessary to live lawfully. Rehabilitation has taken many forms in practice, including psychological analysis, drug and alcohol treatment, high school equivalency and other educational programs, vocational training, relationship counseling, anger-management therapy, religious study, and other services believed to meet the needs of particular offenders.

Because rehabilitation is based on the premise that every offender has different problems to overcome, programs for reform should be fashioned for individual offenders, just as doctors prescribe treatments for individual patients. Thus every sentence is individualized, and even two convicts who have committed the same crime may receive entirely different sentences. For example, an offender driven to steal because of drug addiction will require treatment different than that given to an unemployed immigrant who steals to pay for food for a family. Rehabilitative punishment is thus tailored to the offenders, rather than to the crimes.

According to rehabilitative theories, prison may not be the best venue for achieving its rehabilitative objectives because it isolates offenders from the very realities of life with which they must learn how to cope. Moreover, incarceration conditions offenders to become dependent on institutional care. Noncustodial sentences, such as parole, probation, community service, and deferred sentences serve to keep offenders functioning within their ordinary lives to some degree, while helping them learn how to manage the responsibilities they will face when their sentences expire. Such strategies are thought to be particularly important in the treatment of young offenders.

Rehabilitation seeks to reform not only individual convicts, but also the social conditions contributing to criminal culture. For example, correlations between crime, addiction, and poverty are well known. To some degree, these social ills cause crime. Treating individuals afflicted with these symptoms does not, by itself, stop the spread of the disease infecting so many others. Such problems transcend individual offenders. A complete criminal justice system, therefore, would seek to root out the structural conditions that create criminals. Under this theory, criminal behavior reflects the sickness of society, rather than simply deviant individuals.

Opposition to Rehabilitation

Rehabilitative justifications for punishment have lost popular support since the 1970s in the light of attacks coming from two fronts. While some argue that rehabilitation is fundamentally immoral, others claim it is impractical. Retributivists, who cite the ancient “eye for an eye” maxim and believe that offenders should be punished merely because they deserve to suffer as payment for their transgressions, spearhead moral critiques of rehabilitation. By providing criminals with therapy and education, retributivists argue, society fails to exact the revenge that justice demands. They further argue that this injustice is most evident in the practice of individualized sentencing, which can lead to disparate punishments for the same crimes and spare offenders from serving hard time. Such inequalities are patently unjust to retributivists.

In response to this perceived unfairness, reformers successfully lobbied for punishments to be meted out in determinate and standardized sentences corresponding to the moral desert of offenders. This movement culminated in the federal Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 and the US Sentencing Guidelines, which removed most discretion from sentencing and led to skyrocketing incarceration rates.

Retributivists also find rehabilitation morally unjustifiable because it denies the offenders’ responsibility for their actions by attributing their behavior to forces beyond their control, such as their sickness or circumstances. They object to the way that rehabilitation treats offenders as if they are not ultimately accountable for the choices they made. This practice, according to retributivists, reduces offenders to the level of animals or children and leads to techniques that strip offenders of their dignity.

As Anthony Burgess explored in his 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, it is unclear how far rehabilitative methods will go to reprogram individuals into obedient citizens. As it is now possible to inject drugs into sex offenders that will decrease their libido and to perform psychosurgery to reduce violent tendencies in convicts, it is now possible to create human beings who are effectively unable to choose whether to do good or evil. Because choice is so fundamental to any understanding of what it means to be fully human, such punishment is perceived as inhumane.

In Discipline and Punish (1979), the French philosopher Michel Foucault described the historical shift from spectacular corporal punishments, such drawing and quartering, to more subtle rehabilitative techniques as an increasingly efficient form of social control that blurs boundaries between incarceration and freedom. When punishment and education are conflated, penological methods seep into all of civilian life. Foucault claims that as a result human beings have become a “carceral” society.

Beyond these moral concerns, some doubt the practicality of rehabilitation. First, despite the boom in criminological research, little is still known about what causes crime and even less about how to reform criminal behavior. It is difficult to measure the success of rehabilitative methods, and recidivism rates have done little to change the thinking of those who doubt the effectiveness of rehabilitative techniques. Judging the progress of offenders is subject to interpretation, and offenders who are undergoing treatment have strong incentives to feign reform in order to expedite their own release. For the most serious offenders, most remain skeptical that any amount of therapy can change their ways. However, it may be that the most determinative practical concern has been economic in nature: It is expensive to administer an effective rehabilitative system, and few politicians are willing to devote funds to such a disenfranchised group as unpopular as convicted felons.

Advocates of rehabilitation respond to these criticisms by claiming that their methods have not been fairly tested because they have never been supported by adequate resources. Within the political climate of the early twenty-first century, the decline of rehabilitation provides the political right with an occasion to extend its anthem of “personal responsibility” in matters of distributive justice to justifications for punishment. Just as the poor deserve their fates and can rise from destitution by working harder, conservatives argue, criminals deserve to be held accountable for their actions. For the Left, such arguments for individual autonomy hide behind the deep social and economic injustices that segregate members of racial and economic underclasses behind prison walls.

Bibliography

Allen, Francis. The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal. New Haven: Yale UP, 1981. Print.

Benko, Jessica. "The Radical Humaneness of Norway’s Halden Prison." New York Times. New York Times, 26 Mar. 2015. Web. 31 May 2016.

Braithwaite, John. Crime, Shame and Reintegration. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Print.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979. Print.

Garland, David. The Culture of Control. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Print.

Gilligan, James. "Punishment Fails. Rehabilitation Works." New York Times. New York Times, 19 Dec. 2012. Web. 31 May 2016.

Morris, Norval, and David Rothman. The Oxford History of Punishment: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Print.

Murphy, Jeffrie. Punishment and Rehabilitation. New York: Wadsworth, 1994. Print.

Rothman, David. The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971. Print.

Woodman, Andrew. "Bringing Rehabilitation Back to Prisons." Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost, 16 Apr. 2014. Web. 31 May 2016.