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- Lisa Forsberg, Thomas Douglas
- 2020
- Why Conceptual Clarity is Needed. We need a taxonomy of criminal rehabilitation in order to protect against the conflation and confusion of different conceptions of rehabilitation.
- Divergent Conceptions of Criminal Rehabilitation in the Literature. Though rehabilitation has been an influential concept in debates on criminal justice, it is often not properly defined or elucidated.
- Five Conceptions of Criminal Rehabilitation. We will start by distinguishing five conceptions of rehabilitation on the basis of their aims. Consider first one rather ‘thin’, non-normative, conception of rehabilitation
- Means-Based Subvariants of the Conceptions. In the previous section, we distinguished five different conceptions of rehabilitation on the basis of their aims or ends.
- Overview
- Rehabilitation
- Theories in conflict
- Effectiveness of punishment
The most recently formulated theory of punishment is that of rehabilitation—the idea that the purpose of punishment is to apply treatment and training to the offender so that he is made capable of returning to society and functioning as a law-abiding member of the community. Established in legal practice in the 19th century, rehabilitation was viewed as a humane alternative to retribution and deterrence, though it did not necessarily result in an offender receiving a more lenient penalty than he would have received under a retributive or deterrent philosophy. In many cases rehabilitation meant that an offender would be released on probation under some condition; in other cases it meant that he would serve a relatively longer period in custody to undergo treatment or training. One widely used instrument of rehabilitation in the United States was the indeterminate sentence, under which the length of detention was governed by the degree of reform the offender exhibited while incarcerated.
Although rehabilitation was widely criticized in the United States in the 1970s, it gained greater acceptance once research in the 1980s and ’90s demonstrated that a carefully implemented rehabilitation program could reduce recidivism. Critics nonetheless objected to rehabilitation and sentencing programs that gave significant discretion to the prison administrator, who could decide to release or further detain an offender depending on his assessment of the offender’s progress (which could itself be vaguely defined). At issue were cases in which this authority led to gross abuses, such as the lengthy detention of an offender guilty of only a minor crime, simply because of his inability or refusal to adopt a subservient attitude toward prison officials or other persons in positions of authority.
The most recently formulated theory of punishment is that of rehabilitation—the idea that the purpose of punishment is to apply treatment and training to the offender so that he is made capable of returning to society and functioning as a law-abiding member of the community. Established in legal practice in the 19th century, rehabilitation was viewed as a humane alternative to retribution and deterrence, though it did not necessarily result in an offender receiving a more lenient penalty than he would have received under a retributive or deterrent philosophy. In many cases rehabilitation meant that an offender would be released on probation under some condition; in other cases it meant that he would serve a relatively longer period in custody to undergo treatment or training. One widely used instrument of rehabilitation in the United States was the indeterminate sentence, under which the length of detention was governed by the degree of reform the offender exhibited while incarcerated.
Although rehabilitation was widely criticized in the United States in the 1970s, it gained greater acceptance once research in the 1980s and ’90s demonstrated that a carefully implemented rehabilitation program could reduce recidivism. Critics nonetheless objected to rehabilitation and sentencing programs that gave significant discretion to the prison administrator, who could decide to release or further detain an offender depending on his assessment of the offender’s progress (which could itself be vaguely defined). At issue were cases in which this authority led to gross abuses, such as the lengthy detention of an offender guilty of only a minor crime, simply because of his inability or refusal to adopt a subservient attitude toward prison officials or other persons in positions of authority.
In the practical operation of a sentencing or penal system, theories of punishment often come into conflict. A lenient sentence (such as probation) designed to rehabilitate an offender may fail to express society’s rejection of the behaviour or to provide an effective deterrent to others; a sentence that requires the offender to submit to a compuls...
There is considerable controversy over the effectiveness of punishment in reducing crime. For example, most researchers have failed to find any systematic relationship between crime rates and imprisonment rates: it is equally probable for regions with high imprisonment rates to have high or low crime rates, while increases or decreases in rates of ...
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 109.4: 769–817. This article suggests reasons why recidivism alone is a poor metric for evaluating the success of rehabilitative interventions in the criminal justice system. This article advocates that instead of measuring success by simple rates of recidivism, there should be more nuanced metrics.
Oct 21, 2016 · This relates to Durkheim’s Functionalist Theory that crime and punishment reinforce social regulation, where prison sentence for a crime committed reaffirms the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. Rehabilitation – The aim is to change offenders’ behaviour through education so they can earn an ‘honest living’ on release.
Oct 3, 2020 · An intervention I administered by a criminal justice system to offender O in response to O ’s offence is an instance of rehabilitation just in case it is intended to cure or ameliorate a mental deficit in O that is understood by the intervener (1) to have causally contributed to O ’s past offence (s), or (2) to predispose O to further ...
Oct 3, 2020 · Published in Criminal Law and Philosophy 3 October 2020. Law. It is often said that the institutions of criminal justice ought or—perhaps more often—ought not to rehabilitate criminal offenders. But the term ‘criminal rehabilitation’ is often used without being explicitly defined, and in ways that are consistent with widely divergent ...
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What are the goals of rehabilitation?
Implementing the goals of rehabilitation is particularly challenging in the criminal justice system, and especially in the prison environment. Helping and fostering behavioral and ideational change are often at odds with the prison priorities of cus-tody and control and public safety. Clients in a prison setting are involuntary clients, forced ...
