Offender Rehabilitation

Theory, Research and Practice

Gwen Robinson, Iain D Crow

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781412947718, 9781412947701
• eBook ISBN: 9781446244234
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

?Robinson and Crow have achieved the seemingly impossible: a book about rehabilitation that transcends the "medical model", that is original and contemporary yet grounded in a sophisticated history, and most of all that is fun to read. It will become a new classic text in a field that has been crying out for one? - Professor Shadd Maruna, Queen?s University, Belfast

?In an age where there is much public and political confusion about many criminal justice matters, this book brings considerable clarity to the idea of rehabilitation, its theoretical and historical roots, and contemporary practical application. This is an accessible, lively, and critical account of a concept which is central to the shape of the criminal justice system in pursuance of something that will "work" to reduce reoffending. "Rehabilitation" seems to go in and out of fashion depending on the politics of the day, but the careful and thorough examination of the different contexts in which it operates and competing perspectives on its potential offered here highlights its enduring qualities. This is a fascinating and engaging book by two established and "real world" scholars which will serve students and policy makers alike in the fields of criminal justice and social policy? - Loraine Gelsthorpe, Reader in Criminology and Criminal Justice, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge

This comprehensive text explains all the key themes in the development and practice of offender rehabilitation. It explores how the issue fits within its wider social and political contexts, giving an insight into its current and future relevance to criminal justice.

The book covers the full range of rehabilitative approaches, exploring how criminal justice responses have been influenced by trends such as the treatment model, ?What Works??, desistance, risk and public protection, and changes in social policy. It offers the following essential features:

" theoretical grounding - providing students with all the essential background they need in order to fully understand the subject

" historical context - enabling the reader to see how ideas, policies and practices have developed over time

" research focus - introducing the reader to questions about how rehabilitative approaches have been evaluated and debates about ?what works? for particular groups of offenders, such as sexual offenders and drug misusers

" study questions and further reading - giving students the tools both to revise and to expand their knowledge

Offender Rehabilitation both advances thinking about the notion of rehabilitation, and ensures that students of crime and justice can keep abreast of the most recent developments in this area.

ONE

Introducing Rehabilitation: The Theoretical Context

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Introduction

In this chapter we begin our exploration of offender rehabilitation by considering the ways in which rehabilitation has been represented and understood in the context of offending. This takes us into theoretical territory, as we consider the criminological assumptions which lie behind ideas about offender rehabilitation. We go on to consider the relevance of rehabilitation in the offender’s journey through the criminal justice process: is rehabilitation best understood as a type of punishment; as an alternative to punishment; or something which most appropriately follows punishment? We then turn our attention to the various theoretical justifications for rehabilitative approaches. On what grounds – and in whose interests – have such approaches been promoted or considered desirable? Do offenders have a right to be rehabilitated? In the final part of the chapter we identify and outline some of the main critiques of offender rehabilitation. These centre on questions about justice for offenders; about the use of coercive strategies to change people; and about the degree to which we can justify ‘helping’ offenders when other disadvantaged groups within society may not be able to access the services they need. The chapter closes by posing a number of questions for discussion or further reflection.

The Concept of Rehabilitation

Ideas and practices associated with the rehabilitation of offenders have a long history, stretching back at least as far as the eighteenth century. However, as a concept, rehabilitation is surprisingly difficult to pin down, such that when different writers, theorists or practitioners refer to it, there is quite a good chance that they are not talking about precisely the same thing. This is at least in part because ‘rehabilitation’ can be understood both as a general objective or goal, and as a process or set of practices (Rotman, 1990); but attempts to define rehabilitation are also complicated by a proliferation of related terms. Some of these (such as ‘reform’ and ‘redemption’) have a long history; others (such as ‘reintegration’, ‘resettlement’ and ‘re-entry’) have more recent origins.

Clearly what all of these terms share in common is their prefix ‘re’, which implies a return to a previous condition. It is perhaps unsurprising then to learn that according to a general, dictionary definition, rehabilitation is closely associated with the notion of ‘restoration’, which denotes a return to a former (desirable) state or status. Thinking about rehabilitation as a process of restoration certainly seems to make good sense in medical contexts, where we often talk about the rehabilitation of a person following a physical injury sustained in an accident. Here, there is a clear sense in which the process of rehabilitation involves assisting the individual to get ‘back to normal’. He or she may need to re-learn motor skills, such as how to walk (in the case of a broken limb); or seek to recover cognitive skills, such as memory (in the case of a head injury). In either scenario, rehabilitation implies returning to a former, favourable state.

This is arguably a useful starting point for thinking about the rehabilitation of offenders. If asked to describe a ‘rehabilitated offender’, it is likely that the majority of lay people would indicate a person with some history of offending behaviour which has now ceased. We might think of this as a return to ‘normal’, law-abiding behaviour. This is clearly a behavioural definition: it is about a change in the way a person behaves. So the action of rehabilitation might involve the provision of interventions to remove the propensity, desire or necessity to offend.

But the notion of rehabilitation also has a symbolic dimension, such that it implies a return to a former status: that of a law-abiding citizen who is accepted by and enjoys the same rights as other members of the community. In other words, offender rehabilitation can imply not just behavioural change, but also a symbolic process whereby an individual is permitted to shed the negative label of ‘offender’ and be reinstated within the community after a period of exclusion or censure. Indeed, as Garland (1985) has observed, the concept of rehabilitation was first conceived in French law in the second half of the seventeenth century and was used to refer to the destruction or ‘undoing’ of a criminal conviction. Mannheim (1939: 151) describes the act of rehabilitation in its original context as ‘a deletion of all entries regarding the conviction in the records’.

In England and Wales, this symbolic restoration of the former offender is at the heart of the 1974 Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. The Act was passed largely in response to the recommendations of a committee set up in the early 1970s to consider the problems of a criminal record to ‘rehabilitated persons’, defined as the large number of people ‘who offend once, or a few times, pay the penalty which the courts impose on them, and then settle down to become hard-working and respectable citizens’ (JUSTICE et al., 1972: 5). Recognising the stigma associated with having a criminal conviction, and the barriers thereby erected in respect of gaining employment in particular, the committee’s report argued that there was a need for ‘rehabilitation laws’ which would treat the majority of old convictions, after a period of time had elapsed, as ‘spent and irrelevant’, thereby enabling the social reintegration of the offender.¹

There are, then, good grounds for thinking about offender rehabilitation in terms of restoration. However, that is not to say that the equation of the two concepts is unproblematic. As both Rotman (1990) and Raynor (2004a) have argued, we need to be careful not to confine the concept to the sense of restoration to a pre-existing condition of adequacy. For Raynor, this is principally because we cannot always assume that offenders were ever in a desirable state to which we would wish to restore them. For Rotman, the notion of a return to a former condition is too narrow because it does ‘not cover the achievement of totally new social or psychological developments or the acquisition of new skills’ (1990: 3–4). For both, then, it is arguable that rehabilitation sometimes needs to go further than ‘restoration’, by actually improving upon (as opposed to reverting to) an offender’s original state. So this would suggest a definition of offender rehabilitation as ‘change for the better’.

The Human and Criminological Subject of Rehabilitation

In this section we confront the criminological assumptions which lie behind ‘rehabilitative’ practices and interventions, and posit that all such practices are founded on a particular understanding of the offending subject. In other words, whatever their shape, approaches to rehabilitation are never theoryfree. They reflect particular criminological theories (about why people offend) and, even more broadly, theories about the nature of human behaviour. In this section, then, we address the following question: who is the human and criminological subject of rehabilitation?

Criminological theories tend to view the human subject – the offender in other words – on a core continuum with, at one extreme, active agents who create and shape their world and bear responsibility for the choices and decisions they make; and, at the other, passive subjects whose behaviour is shaped by a variety of forces largely beyond their control (Henry and Milovanovic, 1996: 16). These extreme positions are sometimes characterised in terms of the dichotomy of ‘freedom’ and ‘determinism’, and in criminology they are mirrored, respectively, in the classical and positivist schools of criminology.

The classical tradition, with its roots in eighteenth-century Europe (Beccaria, 1963 [1764]), is founded on a view of the offender as a rational actor and emphasises the role of free will in dictating behaviour (including offending). According to the classical perspective, offending behaviour is a result of the application of choice on the part of the individual: specifically a calculation of the costs and benefits of a particular course of action. Offending, in common with any other form of human behaviour, is motivated by the will to pleasure. In other words, human behaviour is motivated above all else by a desire to seek pleasure and enjoyment, and to avoid pain. As a rational actor, free to choose his or her course of action in any given situation, the offender bears full responsibility for his or her behaviour. Classicism draws no distinction between those who offend and those who do not: we are all thought to be driven by the same impulses and subject to similar temptations.

In contrast positivism – in its extreme manifestation – views the offender as a ‘puppet’ or entirely passive victim of external or internal forces. When viewed in this way, the offender tends to be seen as bearing little or no responsibility for his or her actions. As a consequence, it follows that he ought to be ‘treated’ or ‘helped’, much like someone suffering from a physical illness, in an attempt to remove the causes of his offending. It was this set of assumptions which animated the so-called ‘treatment model’ which dominated the way offenders were dealt with in the mid-part of the twentieth century, and which we shall encounter in greater detail in Chapter 2. Less extreme versions of positivism contend that offenders’ behaviour is not entirely determined but nonetheless their ability to exercise free will is likely to have been constrained by factors not entirely within their control (e.g. poverty; mental illness; or attitudes learned from antisocial/pro-criminal peers or family members). In this scenario it follows that whilst offenders bear some responsibility for their offending, they can claim some mitigation for their behaviour and it might be possible to prevent reoffending if the factors which led them to offend are tackled or confronted.

Positivist criminology has its roots in the work of Italians Cesare Lombroso, Enrico Ferri and Raffaele Garofalo. Lombroso, whose highly influential book L’Uomo Delinquente (‘The Criminal Man’) was first published in 1876, is best known for his Darwinian theory that offenders were atavistic ‘throwbacks’ to an earlier stage of evolution: that is, biologically inferior subjects. However, not all positivist explanations rest on biological assumptions. There are in fact three main types² of positivist explanation: (i) biological; (ii) psychological; and (iii) social/environmental. Thus, positivist assumptions may recommend interventions aimed at changing people and/or their social/environmental circumstances.

A positivist perspective then, tends to recommend ‘expert’ intervention to deal with offending behaviour: that is, some intervention likely to involve the identification of the causes of offending (‘diagnosis’) and their subsequent ‘removal’. One possible exception to this is some versions of biological positivism: if it is theorised that offending is a result of some biological abnormality for which there is no cure then there are fewer grounds for optimism.

In Britain and elsewhere, the history of attempts to rehabilitate offenders is intimately entwined with the emergence and development of positivist criminology, and a view of offending behaviour as determined (to a greater or lesser extent) by factors which lie outside the individual’s control (e.g. Hollin, 2004). During the 1950s and 1960s, in the USA and Britain, positivism came to dominate criminological thinking and the ‘treatment model’ associated with it reflected a common belief that both the causes of – and the cure for – crime would ultimately be discovered, relieving society of the problem of crime forever. Allen (1959) famously referred to this as the rehabilitative ideal. Correspondingly, the decline of the treatment model in the latter part of the twentieth century is associated with the critique of positivist criminology and the emergence of a neo-classical perspective on offending behaviour, which revived the image of the rational offender exercising more or less free choices.

It is however important to note that attempts to rehabilitate offenders both pre-date ‘mainstream’ positivist criminology and have survived its decline in the latter part of the twentieth century. As Clive Hollin (2004) has noted, and as we shall see in later chapters, the revival of a neo-classical perspective has been linked with a revival of rehabilitative optimism. So whilst the link between rehabilitation and positivist criminology must certainly be acknowledged, we should not assume an entirely dependent relationship. Later in this chapter we explore the various theoretical justifications for rehabilitation, which go a long way to explaining how and why rehabilitative approaches have such a long history and show no signs of extinction.

Rehabilitation and the Criminal Justice Process

We have already noted, above, that the notion of rehabilitation is not confined to offenders. Thus, for example, we commonly refer to the rehabilitation of persons who have been injured or are otherwise ‘debilitated’ by some medical condition. Even more generally, we talk about the rehabilitation (as in ‘revival’) of particular fashions, whether it be the mini-skirt, the wedge heel, or ‘flares’.

Of course, none of these contexts is of focal concern in this book. Rather, our principal focus is the applicability of the notion of rehabilitation to offenders: namely, individuals who have broken the law. This however begs certain questions about how and in what contexts ‘rehabilitation’ becomes relevant to such individuals. For example, does it imply a particular type of punishment or sanction? Is it best understood as a type of punishment or an alternative to punishment? Or is it perhaps better summed up as a process which follows punishment? There is no single ‘correct’ answer to any of these questions: rather, there are a number of different ‘ways of seeing’ rehabilitation in the context of punishment or penal sanctions.

Rehabilitation and diversion

The first point to make is that access to services or sources of help which can broadly be described as ‘rehabilitative’ is not necessarily contingent upon an offender having been processed by the criminal justice system. A good example is people who misuse drugs. By virtue of their consumption of illegal substances, such individuals may well have broken the law on many occasions; but it is perfectly possible not only that such individuals may evade detection, but also that they may enter into treatment voluntarily.³ When celebrities enter ‘rehab’, for example – typically because of problems associated with the consumption of illegal drugs – it is often in the absence of any criminal proceedings against them.

It is also sometimes the case that an offender whose offending has been detected may avoid prosecution or criminal sanctions but nonetheless be referred by a criminal justice agency to rehabilitative help. One such example is the use of diversion schemes, whereby offenders (typically juveniles or mentally disordered offenders) are sometimes referred to sources of help or treatment-type interventions as an alternative to prosecution. Since the 1970s a variety of diversionary schemes and measures have been introduced, in Britain and elsewhere, under the influence of labelling theory. Labelling theory emphasises the damaging and stigmatising effects of a criminal label on young offenders and thus recommends ‘diversionary’ measures to keep them out of the criminal justice system for as long as possible. Other offenders may get as far as court and be diverted from there. For example, in 1990 the Home Office provided guidance on the policy of diversion and aimed to ensure that, where possible, mentally disordered offenders were referred to health and social services for support and treatment rather than punished via prosecution and criminal sanctions (Home Office, 1990). Courts can thus opt for a disposal under the Mental Health Act 1983, such as a Hospital Order, in place of a criminal justice disposal (such as prison) where the offender has been assessed as having a mental disorder.

Rehabilitative punis...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introducing Rehabilitation: The Theoretical Context
• 2 Rehabilitation In An Historical Context
• 3 Delivering Rehabilitation: Custodial And Community Contexts
• 4 The Evaluation Context
• 5 Reviving Rehabilitation: The ‘What Works?’ Movement
• 6 Assessing Offenders: Risks, Needs, Responsivity And Strengths
• 7 Offending Behaviour Programmes
• 8 Social Rehabilitation
• 9 Emerging Approaches: Rehabilitation And The Relational Context
• 10 Conclusion: Rehabilitation In The Twenty-First Century
• References
• Index