Rehabilitation (criminal)

SIGNIFICANCE: 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 people deserve to suffer for any crimes they commit, the rehabilitative ideal views criminal behavior more as a kind of disease that should be treated.

Many people convicted of crimes suffer from mental and physical illnesses, drug addictions, and limited opportunities for economic success, and these problems increase their likelihood of recidivism. Proponents of rehabilitation have argued that if the justice system simply incarcerates people 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 people can actually make them more likely than before to commit offenses after they are released. According to proponents, high rates of recidivism attest to this. A rehabilitative approach to punishment attempts to treat the underlying causes of transgressions so that people can return to society to become productive citizens. Instead of exacting revenge against people 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 people convicted of crimes from one another to remove them from the temptations that had driven them to crime and to provide individuals 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 people 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 people who commit crimes 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 individuals.

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

According to rehabilitative theories, prison may not be the best venue for achieving rehabilitative objectives because it isolates people from the very realities of life with which they must learn how to cope. Moreover, incarceration conditions people 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 people who commit crimes.

Rehabilitation seeks to reform not only individuals who commit crimes 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 individuals. A complete criminal justice system, therefore, would seek to root out the structural conditions that lead people to commit crimes. Under this theory, criminal behavior reflects the sickness of society rather than simply deviant individuals.

The US Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has focused increased attention on rehabilitation as a means of reducing prison populations and recidivism. Such efforts included the passage into law in 2018 of the First Step Act. People who are imprisoned are to be evaluated the day they enter the prison system to determine the individual's criminogenic factors, including criminal history, education level, and factors such as substance abuse. The BOP then creates an individualized plan to address these issues; for example, by providing them with an education within the federal prison system, offering job training, and treating addictions.

Opposition to Rehabilitation

Rehabilitative justifications for punishment have traditionally faced 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 people who commit crimes should be punished merely because they deserve to suffer as payment for their transgressions, spearhead moral critiques of rehabilitation. By providing people who commit crimes 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 people 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 people committing crimes. 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 person’s responsibility for their actions by attributing their behavior to forces beyond their control, such as mental illness or societal circumstances. They say that rehabilitation treats people as if they are not ultimately accountable for the choices they made. This practice, according to retributivists, reduces people to the level of animals or children and leads to techniques that strip people of their dignity.

Beyond moral concerns, some doubt the practicality of rehabilitation. Despite advancements in criminological research, what directly causes crime remained unclear, they have argued, 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 people who have committed crimes is subject to interpretation, and people who are undergoing treatment have strong incentives to feign reform to expedite their own release. For the most serious crimes, most remain skeptical that any amount of therapy can change someone's 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 people convicted of felonies.

Bibliography

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