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Rehabilitation of Punishment

NCJ Number
75107
Journal
Public Interest Issue: 44 Dated: (Summer 1976) Pages: 104-114
Author(s)
M F Plattner
Date Published
1976
Length
11 pages
Annotation
A history of the increasing opposition to the rehabilitative ideal of corrections and to indeterminate sentencing is presented.
Abstract
From 1870 through the 1960's, reformers strove to have this ideal and method of sentencing embodied in public policy, partly in the belief that crime was a form of deviant behavior whose causes lay in individual or social pathology. Criminals were often viewed as victims of social or psychological disorders who needed treatment by behavioral science experts. Since the amount of treatment required depended upon the characteristics of the individual offender, judges were granted wide discretion in deciding the lengths of sentences. The intellectual reaction against such views had its sources in the general social and intellectual ferment of the 1960's and gathered real force in the 1970's. Rising crime rates in the 1960's, as well as opposition to the view that America had a fundamentally just society, allowed the assumptions underlying the rehabilitative theory to be discredited. Instead of assuming that the laws that were broken were just ones, people perceived rehabilitation as a weapon of middle class oppression against poor, miniority captives. Indeterminate sentencing was viewed as unjust because offenders convicted of similar crimes received widely disparate periods of imprisonment. Furthermore, the frequent failure of courts to incarcerate offenders led to fears that even the deterrent capabilities of imprisonment were being reduced. Finally, studies of numerous rehabilitative treatment programs revealed that they were not succeeding in reducing recidivism. References that support the gathering opposition to rehabilitation are reviewed in the text.