7.5. Rehabilitation
David Carter and Kate McLean
Rehabilitation
While its roots are more shallow than the three previous ideologies, rehabilitation is not brand new. Additionally, it is the only one of the four main ideologies that most accurately attempts to address all three goals of corrections, which are:
1. Punish the offender
2. Protect Society
3. Rehabilitate the offender.
Certainly, all four ideologies address the first two goals, punishment, and societal protection. However, the goal of rehabilitating the offender is either silent, or not addressed in retribution, deterrence, or incapacitation. This does come as a cost. As we will talk about in more detail when covering prisons and jails, our societal reliance on incarceration has resulted in a persistent paradox. Most offenders will come out of institutions – roughly 95% of all people who enter prisons are released – yet little is done to change them while they are there. This is mostly due to our attitudes towards offenders, the policies that guide prison life, and the institutions themselves. And yet, there is the expectation that these individual leaving prisons will not commit crimes in the future.
Rehabilitation has taken on different forms through its history in the United States. In the 19th century, a group of justice reformers theorized that prisons might serve as a place for spiritual rehabilitation. Offenders were conceptualized as “out of touch with God”, and so a solution to their criminality was to show penitence (or remorse after reflection). One of America’s earliest prisons was designed with this in mind. The Eastern State Penitentiary, opening in 1829, included outside reflection yards, so that offenders could look up to God in penance.
Reformatories, which followed the penitentiary model, were another example of how rehabilitation was viewed in the past. The reform movement tried to rehabilitate the offender through more humane treatment, to include basic education, religious services, work experience, and general reform efforts. This was done in an effort to “fix” and improve individuals, thus allowing them to come back to society successfully. The Elmira Reformatory was one of the earliest efforts of the reform ideal, and many prisons built in the United States were based on this prison. Below is a picture of Elmira.
Other attempts at rehabilitation included more medical approaches. Beginning in the early 20th century, some correctional theorists promulgated the idea that offenders were sick or biologically abnormal – sometimes incurably so. Such theories informed policies of informal prisoner sterilization, as well as surgical interventions that we would now recognize as pseudoscientific, inhumane, or cruel. The medical approach, while largely discredited, still informs some penal policies today. For example, the chemical castration of certain offenders does still occur. In Oklahoma, as of September of 2018, sex offenders must undergo mandatory treatment with medro