The analysis uses two case studies, one on the methods used by treatment professionals to socialize inebriate or alcoholic offenders and the other on the classifications and procedures created by treatment professionals to understand and manage morally insane or psychopathic offenders. The analysis begins by arguing that much of the critical literature of the 1970’s and 1980’s on the medical model of crime is of limited usefulness for understanding and assessing actual therapeutic interventions into the lives of offenders, because the criticism focused on abstract ideas and arguments. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the nature of therapeutic interventions into the lives of offenders and to reopen the prematurely closed debate about their meaning and consequences. The analysis argues that therapeutic interventions into the lives of offenders are not usually modeled on medical treatment of either the physically or the mentally ill, contrary to common assumptions. Instead, treatment techniques tend to be much closer in their nature to the moral management advocated and practiced in some 19th-century lunatic asylums and to the social therapy advocated and practices in some areas of modern psychiatry is a alternative to medical-style treatment. The analysis also argues that therapeutic interventions rest on broad moral-environmentalist and social-psychological focuses and not on narrow views of these offenders and that procedures for admitting offenders to treatment differ significantly from those targeted by critics of the medical model. Finally, the book argues that treatment professionals tend to regard therapeutic interventions as appropriate for relatively few offenders and not, as critics assert, as applicable to most offenders. Footnotes, index, and 181 references