When other people in society refrain from crime because they witness offenders' punishment and fear suffering a similar fate, this is called general deterrence. Finally, the third goal, incapacitation , makes no assumption about offenders and why they committed crimes. Instead, it seeks to achieve the utilitarian goal of reducing crime by "caging" or incarcerating offenders. If behind bars and thus "incapacitated," crime will be impossible because the offender is not free in society where innocent citizens can be criminally victimized.
In comparison, rehabilitation differs from retribution, but is similar to deterrence and incapacitation, in that it is a utilitarian goal, with the utility or benefit for society being the reduction of crime.
It fundamentally differs from the other three perspectives, however, because these other goals make no attempt to change or otherwise improve offenders. Instead, they inflict pain or punishment on offenders either for a reason retribution in order to "get even" or deterrence in order to "scare people straight" or as a consequence of the penalty incapacitation involves placing offenders in an unpleasant living situation, the prison.
In contrast, rehabilitation seeks to assist both offenders and society. Hechinger, the public defender, has seen similar problems with his clients, most of whose jobs behind bars have been sweeping, mopping, and cleaning toilets. The program partnered with 67 colleges and universities across the country to offer classes in prisons and online and launched this summer.
Legislation that would fully eliminate the ban on Pell funding was introduced in the House in , and an identical proposal was introduced in the Senate. Both bills await hearings.
The average recidivism rate among all prisoners is problematically high: 68 percent return within three years of release. Lorenzo Brooks, who served 30 years behind bars, credits his personal transformation to the access he had to higher education in the eight years before the crime bill passed.
Convicted of second-degree murder in , Brooks was sentenced to 20 years to life for stabbing a woman to death during a robbery the year before. At the time of the crime, Brooks was 30 and struggling with a crack cocaine addiction.
While he describes his early years in prison as largely idle, once he began visiting the prison library and taking classes, he noticed a shift. It got me thinking about myself, the crime I had committed, and the harm I had caused myself, my family, and my community. He immediately joined the movement to bring back higher education to prisons—something he advocates for today, in the first year of his life outsideprison. Brooks was incarcerated for 32 years and was denied parole nine times before being released.
Both Gilligan and Hechinger noted the power of providing education behind bars. Gilligan cites earning a college degree while incarcerated as the most successful means of preventing violence both in prison and afterward. Studies conducted by state corrections departments as well as the federal Bureau of Prisons illustrate the correlation between education and reduced recidivism rates.
Rehabilitative programming, educational or otherwise, often runs up against a well-worn rhetoric of punishment that rejects the notion that costly programming should be made available to people convicted of heinous crimes. But Gilligan sees no alternative.
Why Aren't We Doing it? Visit takepart. Rebecca McCray is a staff writer covering social justice. She is based in New York. Photo: Randi Baird. But, if the idea that "nothing works" was well- received by liberals, it was even better news for conservatives who demanded tougher handling of offenders. But, to a nation emerging from the Vietnam War and an unruly youth and drug culture, "nothing works" was a slogan for the times.
The decade from to saw reported murders double from 4. Assault rose from The idea that this explosion of street crime must be due to an attitude of permissiveness was particularly appealing. Barry Goldwater tried unsuccessfully to make crime an issue in the campaign. But as the crime rates rose, Richard Nixon, elevated the matter to a high art. The campaign made crime a major issue. Ironically, John Mitchell led the attack, successfully focusing on then-Attorney General Ramsey Clark, much in the fashion of the recent Presidential campaign.
The implication was that the criminal justice system, and in particular, corrections, had grown soft by over-relying on such vague concepts as "rehabilitation. There has never been a rehabilitative era in American corrections. Most correctional systems had few, if any trained psychiatrists, psychologists, or social workers. Virtually all correctional budgets went to staff that operated traditional prisons, jails and reform schools.
What looked to outsiders like permissiveness was more often neglect and chaos in a system overcome with an explosion of "baby- boomers. Martinson cut a near prophetic figure as he criss-crossed the country debating criminologists, cajoling prison wardens, and advising legislators and policymakers that rehabilitation had had its day.
And as the issue got hotter, others took it up. Neo-conservative Harvard management professor, James Q. Wilson added mans' nature to the equation.
In his influential book, Thinking About Crime , Wilson wrote, "It requires not merely optimistic but heroic assumptions about the nature of man to lead one to suppose that a person, finally sentenced after in most cases many brushes with the law, and having devoted a good part of his youth and young adulthood to misbehavior of every sort, should, by either the solemnity of prison or the skillfulness of a counselor, come to see the error of his ways and to experience a transformation of his character.
Martinson had a less Calvinistic view. Arrested as a civil rights "freedom rider," he had spent 40 days in the maximum security unit of Mississippi's Parchman State Penitentiary. He as reluctant to posit an offender's intransigence to fallen human nature, unduly heaped upon the poor and minorities who people our prisons. But others, particularly Wilson and conservative writer, Ernest van den Haag, soon moved the debate beyond Martinson's control.
Since "nothing works" in rehabilitating offenders, we must deter and incapacitate them through harsher prison sentences and occasional use of the death penalty. Because of the controversy in , the National Academy of Sciences appointed a Panel to re-evaluate the Lipton, Martinson, and Wilks survey. The Panel's findings were subject to wide interpretation, but central to its conclusion was the comment, "When it is asserted that 'nothing works,' the Panel is uncertain as to just what has even been given a fair trial.
Most rehabilitative programs chalked up as failures, were heavy on rhetoric and slim on services. The classic year "Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study" begun at Harvard in the late s and used ever since by critics of rehabilitation as a premier example of the "nothing works" position, was summarized by Wilson in this way, "The differences in crime between those youth who were given special services counseling, special educational programs, guidance, health assistance, camping trips and a matched control group were insignificant: 'the treatment had little effect'.
Three hundred and twenty boys were assigned to ten counselors who were told to do 'whatever they thought best' for their clients. Counselors had no formal training in the mental health field, much less in psychotherapy. Each youth was seen an average of five times per year during the early years of the project in meetings directed at such things as arranging physical exams or interesting a boy in summer camp. Not surprisingly, the subjects showed no drop in criminal behavior at , , and year follow-ups.
It seems bizarre to have expected otherwise. Some rehabilitative models have failed even in their own terms. Most research for example, suggests it is difficult to successfully rehabilitate offenders in prisons and reform schools. In a comprehensive "cohort" study, Ohio State University researchers found that the "velocity of recidivism" among young offenders actually increased with each institutionalization. This experience has been confirmed in recent research by the RAND Corporation on adult inmates of state prisons.
The implication is that the prisons are criminogenic - producing the very thing they claim to treat. But there is just as much support for rehabilitation.
A particular type of alternative to custody is a deferred prosecution agreement, where criminal charges are not brought against defendants if they fulfil certain conditions. The success of Operation Checkpoint will no doubt spur more interest in the area. An international comparison reveals some interesting trends.
Norway moved its focus from punishment to rehabilitation including for those who were imprisoned 20 years ago. This was followed by large reductions in reoffending rates. There is much to learn from this. A lot of people processed within the criminal justice system have vulnerabilities that can make them prone to offending, which might suggest why rehabilitation can be so successful. Recent evidence suggests that the UK prison population has serious levels of self-harm. Releasing such people without investing in their treatment is bound to lead to reoffending.
A substantial portion of criminals, then, could benefit from support rather than punishment. Locking up or otherwise criminalising people with these vulnerabilities also raise ethical issues.
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