This is a profoundly important issue. In most fields, limited progress is seen as productive. A person with viral pneumonia who has been treated in a hospital is not labeled a "failure" and re- hospitalized at the first sign of a cough.
But a rehabilitative program which lowers the number or de-escalates the seriousness of repeat crimes is usually seen as unacceptable. As a result, one can have a "successful" program with high rates of recidivism. In one study of a family therapy program geared to hard-core delinquents, 30 adolescents each with 20 previous adjudicated offenses , were matched with a control group of 44 delinquents with similar offense histories.
At the end of a month follow-up, 60 percent of the family therapy group had committed a new offense. This looked like failure. But then, we see that 93 percent of the control group which didn't get the therapy had been so charged.
If this were not a political arena, rehabilitation would be judged against the alternatives proposed by those who reject it. Measuring recidivism is further complicated by other contemporary events. Simply residing in some communities increases the likelihood of contact with the criminal justice system and being labeled a recidivist.
Nearly half, 46 percent of boys in some areas will appear in juvenile court during their teen years. Among young black men in certain parts of the country, seven out of ten can anticipate being arrested at least once. Though this may suggest failure, it is not necessarily a true measure of individual criminal behavior. But the NAS Panel identified the elements it saw as crucial to successful programs.
Where there is a wide adversity of strong alternatives, recidivism can be lowered. Where there is little choice, recidivism remains the same or increases. This was what University of Southern California sociologist, Lamar Empey found in this famous "Provo Project" which showed that recidivism rates fell significantly for youthful offenders placed in community-based programs, when compared with youth in state institutions.
It was reiterated a decade later by Harvard's Center for Criminal Justice, when researchers studied recidivism among youthful delinquents placed in community treatment as opposed to state reform schools. Serious delinquents placed in the community with no treatment showed no lower rates of recidivism than reform school youth, and in many cases did worse. Better performance wasn't simply a matter of maturation, but seemed related to the number and quality of treatment options.
The intensity and integrity of the treatment was crucial to lowering recidivism rates. Though this may seem self-evident, it's foreign to corrections. The corrections establishment made up, for the most part, of administrators, former guards, or political appointees with little background in such arcane subjects as social deviance and recidivism, has never been more than faintly interested in rehabilitation. Even programs ballyhooed as rehabilitative, such as the much maligned "furlough," are tolerated not so much for their rehabilitative effect, as for the fact that they provide incentives which lead to smoother prison management.
Corrections is a system of extremes - debilitating prisons vs. To use a medical analogy, it would be like asking a doctor for relief from a headache, and being told there are only two treatments - an aspirin or a lobotomy. More often, it's like going to the same doctor with a broken arm or an acute appendicitis and being told the same two treatments, an aspirin or a lobotomy, are all that's available.
Criminal behavior is no more unitary than any other individual or social malady. If the treatment options are so narrow as to be irrelevant, the likelihood of success is diminished. The simple mathematics along suggest that the chances of fitting the treatment to the individual offender are enhanced when there are more choices.
In Massachusetts, for example, recidivism fell among former reform school youth in those regions of the state where a wide range of community-based alternatives were created,.
Where there was no such array of services, recidivism remained the same or increased. It was not a matter of identifying any single regimen which worked for all offenders. Rather, success was in the mix of models. The common thread which wound its way through the most effective programs of whatever type, was whether or not they had close ties to the community.
Interestingly, such services, alone or in combination, were no more expensive than state reform schools. The basic idea of rehabilitation through imprisonment is that a person who has been incarcerated will never want to be sent back to prison after they have been set free.
Unfortunately, research has consistently shown that time spent in prison does not successfully rehabilitate most inmates, and the majority of criminals return to a life of crime almost immediately. Many argue that most prisoners will actually learn new and better ways to commit crimes while they are locked up with their fellow convicts. Whether or not they take themselves to be defending a variant of rehabilitation, those who defend the moral improvement of offenders as a legitimate goal of criminal justice understand moral improvement in different ways, and we might recognise these differences by distinguishing a number of different variants of rehabilitation as moral improvement.
These variants share a commitment to a specific kind of end, that is, making the offender morally better, but differ in their understanding of what becoming morally better consists in the nature of moral improvement , and on what sorts of moral improvement rehabilitation may legitimately aim at the scope of legitimate moral improvement.
On the nature of moral improvement we can, for example, distinguish between views according to which moral improvement consists in the acquisition of more justified moral beliefs, more morally virtuous character traits, more praiseworthy moral motives, or more morally desirable actions.
Footnote 48 On the scope of legitimate moral improvement, we can distinguish between attempts to morally improve a person with respect to the particular type of conduct for which the individual has been convicted, or more globally.
Footnote 49 There appears then to be much agreement on the nature of moral improvement, but there are also important differences between their accounts, in particular regarding the scope of legitimate moral improvement. Morris favours a view on which rehabilitative measures may permissibly aim at a global kind of moral improvement.
Footnote 55 In this way, moral education imparts on offenders moral knowledge that will help them choose to do what is right. Footnote 56 This suggests a narrower understanding of the legitimate scope of rehabilitation; rehabilitation should only or at least mainly target moral improvements relevant to the particular sort of criminal activity that has been committed.
Similarly, Duff defends what some see as a rehabilitation-based account of criminal justice aimed at moral improvement Footnote 57 on which it is not permissible for moral improvement to take a focus that is too global or wide-ranging. As with the aims invoked by thin conceptions of rehabilitation, the aim of moral improvement may, on rehabilitation as moral improvement , be proximal to some further aim, such as the promotion of offender wellbeing, the social good, the non-instrumental value of being morally good or the non-instrumental value of becoming morally better , or some combination of these.
It may also be distal to some more immediate aim, such as the promotion of offender empathy, self-control, self-understanding, or introspection.
Proponents of rehabilitation, as conceived in rehabilitation as moral improvement , typically assume some non-instrumental value to moral improvement. Rehabilitation as restoration. This could include social and vocational capacities as well as moral ones.
On this variant, criminal rehabilitation is in some respects akin to the payment of compensatory damages at tort law; its concern is to bring it about that the offender compensates his victim, pays off a moral debt owed to his victim, corrects the wrong committed, or restores the moral balance between offender and victim.
A third, hybrid variant would understand rehabilitation as aiming at the restoration of both moral and social relationships. Footnote 61 This seems to be the most commonly held variant of the view. Footnote 67 They explain that. Achieving such a change in attitude may entail the offender agreeing to undergo training, counselling or therapy and, as such, these may all be seen as part of reparative justice.
A forced apology or obligatory payment of compensation will not suffice; indeed, it may even be counterproductive in eliciting a genuine change of attitude in the offender.
In the previous section, we distinguished five different conceptions of rehabilitation on the basis of their aims or ends. In relation to the first two conceptions— rehabilitation as anti - recidivism and rehabilitation as harm - reduction —we introduced a condition restricting the means that could be used to achieve the intended aim.
In respect of the latter three conceptions— rehabilitation as therapy, rehabilitation as moral improvement, and rehabilitation as restoration —we included no such condition. This is because in respect of the first two conceptions, such a condition was needed to distinguish rehabilitation from incapacitation and deterrence. In respect of the latter, we do not think a means-based condition is necessary to distinguish rehabilitation from other functions of criminal justice.
Nevertheless, some proponents of these latter three conceptions may also wish to impose means-based constraints on what can qualify as rehabilitation—or permissible rehabilitation—and we can distinguish subvariants of these views by reference to the nature and stringency of these constraints. We have already hinted at such subvariants of rehabilitation as moral improvement.
Footnote 71 The change in dispositions in the offender ought to be the result of his autonomous reflection. Hampton, Morris, and Duff all hold that attempts at moral improvement should seek to bring it about that the offender among other things becomes convinced that his actions were wrong, feels guilty about his actions, and resolves not to perform similar actions again.
Such transformations could potentially be produced through, for example, brain washing or conditioning, but these authors reject the use of such means. Though they reject the label themselves, Hampton, Morris and Duff can—as we have seen—be characterised as proponents of rehabilitation on rehabilitation as moral improvement.
However, a more fine-grained characterisation of their views would understand them as proponents of a subvariant of this conception, according to which moral improvement must be sought through rationality-engaging, and not rationality-bypassing, means. The distinction between rationality-engaging and rationality-bypassing interventions might be relevant to other conceptions of rehabilitation too.
Footnote 74 Shaw does not herself commit to any of the particular conceptions of rehabilitation that we delineate above. However, we could imagine that proponents of any of the conceptions that we have outlined might wish to invoke a reason-engagingness requirement that would render certain means incompatible with its conception of rehabilitation. Moving beyond the criminal justice literature, such a requirement has also been advocated in relation to, for example, the treatment of depression, where it is has figured in arguments for preferring psychotherapy to anti-depressants.
There are further distinctions that can be made between subvariants of the different conceptions of rehabilitation based on the means they take to be consistent with permissible rehabilitation. For example, one of the present authors Douglas has distinguished between perceptual and non-perceptual influences, that is, interventions whose primary motivational effects are mediated by perceptual processes, and interventions where this is not the case.
Footnote 78 Douglas rejects the moral significance of the distinction, but notes that some might argue that, whereas perceptual means to rehabilitation can be permissible, non-perceptual means cannot, because they operate bring about their intended motivational effects in a way that is non-transparent to the recipient, or is difficult for the recipient to monitor, or is irresistible. Footnote 80 As they understand it, this distinction is not co-extensive with either the distinction between rationality-engaging and rationality-bypassing interventions, or that between perceptual and non-perceptual interventions.
On the one hand, Bublitz and Merkel take perceptual mediation to be necessary, but perhaps not sufficient, for an intervention to qualify as indirect. Among permissible interventions, Bublitz and Merkel mention conscious or direct communication and psychotherapy, while they take impermissible direct interventions to include the administration of psychoactive substances and deep brain stimulation. As with the distinction between rationality-engaging and rationality-bypassing interventions, requirements to engage perception or to employ indirect means may potentially be used to generate further means-based subvariants of each of the conceptions of rehabilitation we identified in Sect.
Delineating the five different ends-based conceptions of criminal rehabilitation identified by our taxonomy, and further means based subvariants, has, we think, at least two payoffs. One payoff is that the taxonomy helps to define the scope of some objections to rehabilitative theories of criminal justice. Delineating different conceptions of rehabilitation makes it clear which conceptions are, and are not, susceptible to common criticisms of rehabilitation.
Footnote 84 Our taxonomy suggests that this objection is more limited in its scope than proponents have seemed to assume. If the objection is based on i , it seems to apply primarily to rehabilitation as therapy , on which rehabilitation presupposes a mental deficit.
Insofar as a mental deficit implies a lack of mental capacity, this view arguably presupposes that the recipient of the rehabilitation is less than fully responsible though this will depend on which incapacities exactly are implied—the objection will have its fullest force in relation to what we called the forensic understanding of rehabilitation as therapy , since, on this understanding, rehabilitation targets precisely those mental capacities that are relevant to criminal responsibility.
Other conceptions of rehabilitation are not vulnerable to this objection, since they do not presuppose any mental incapacity or lack of rational agency. Perhaps rehabilitation as moral improvement and rehabilitation as anti - recidivism presuppose that the target of rehabilitation is flawed in some way.
Footnote 85 However, there is no reason to suppose that the flaw must be a lack of capacity rather than, say, a lack of moral virtue or the presence of immoral motives. She conceives of offenders as responsible moral agents who have acted immorally and to which punishment sends the moral message that they have acted immorally. Our taxonomy thus clearly shows that we can reject rehabilitation, as characterised by rehabilitation as therapy or certain subvariants thereof, for the reasons proponents of the theoretical objection give—that it fails to treat offenders as morally responsible agents—but deny that these concerns or criticisms apply to other conceptions of rehabilitation and perhaps thereby maintain that rehabilitation on these other conceptions is a legitimate function of criminal justice.
All of the conceptions of rehabilitation that we have introduced including rehabilitation as therapy are compatible with rehabilitation being pursued through rationality-engaging means, such as engaging an offender in rational dialogue. But, as we noted, such a constraint could also be included in other conceptions, including rehabilitation as therapy, giving defenders of rehabilitation a way of avoiding objections based on ii.
A second payoff of our taxonomy is that it helps to draw links with other literatures by suggesting parallels between rehabilitation and other types of intervention. For example, on rehabilitation as anti - recidivism and rehabilitation as harm - reduction , rehabilitation is somewhat similar to some public health interventions, such as behaviour change campaigns intended to protect public health for example, drink driving campaigns, vaccination promotion campaigns , suggesting that literature from public health might fruitfully inform discussions of rehabilitation.
Parallels between criminal justice and public health have already received some attention, but these have focussed on quarantine, Footnote 89 which, since it operates via the imposition of external constraints, is more analogous to incapacitation than rehabilitation.
Other types of public health intervention, such as health promotion campaigns intended to encourage vaccination or social distancing, are more closely analogous to rehabilitation. There are further possible links with other literatures that have not been explored, or which warrant further attention.
On rehabilitation as therapy , for example, rehabilitation is in some respects similar to standard medical treatment, suggesting that literature from medical and psychiatric ethics—and especially on non-consensual psychiatric interventions—might be relevant to the discussion of rehabilitation. On rehabilitation as moral improvement, rehabilitation is relevantly similar to, for instance, the moral education of children, which standardly also aims at moral improvement.
Again, this is a topic on which there is also some existing ethical discussion. Footnote 90 Drawing these links may help to clarify the types of interventions that can permissibly be used to rehabilitate offenders, and constraints that ought to be placed on their use.
For example, a consent requirement in relation to rehabilitative interventions is suggested by rehabilitation as therapy , given that consent is standardly required for medical therapies, but not by some other conceptions, such as rehabilitation as anti - recidivism. While the retributive idea of justice seeks to inflict a cost or hardship on the criminal as a just response to crime, the rehabilitation model seeks to provide support that can reform the criminal.
While this debate has often been cast as one between those who fully believe in punishment and those who want to see prison time completely cut and replaced with rehabilitative programmes, most people believe in both. The debate is more often about what the right mix is. In the UK, for example, there is wide public support for tough criminal justice sanctions. 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.
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