I had posted this link in another thread, and in looking at the parade of criminals, I wondered if in several hundred years of trying various rehabilitation methodologies in western societies, anything had ever been discovered that really worked to effectively rehabilitate criminals?
We’ve been trying to rehab criminals for some time now. What really works?
I’ve spent twenty five years working in prisons and I’ve never seen any method that will rehabilitate another person. The working theory of myself and others is that you offer people opportunities and assistance to rehabilitate themselves and hope that they’ll do so.
If you want to discuss the details, I’ll debate Pennsylvania vs Auburn vs Elmira and argue the merits of determinate sentencing and reminisce on my experiences with Shock and Network and ASAT.
There’s a story in last week’s New Scientist which says, inter alia:
So it seems if you get them early enough, yes, you can make a difference.
That aside the biggest factor in rehabilitation seems to be age; a lot just grow out of crime.
Chemically dependent people tend to not re-offend if they get into recovery.
The best treatment modalities generally result in about 50% long-term recovery rates over time, while the spontaneous remission rate without treatment is around 10%.
And since about 70% of inmates have a history of substance abuse, effective drug and alcohol treatment could make quite a dent in the recidivism rate.
Right now, in my state, about 2/3 of the inmates re-offend or violate the rules of their parole and end up back in prison again after release.
Oh, 32% of our inmates also have serious mental illnesses which helped get them locked up, too. Decent psychiatric treatment in conjunction with substance abuse treatment could help there too.
I think one problem is that society waits too long to deal with crime. Even if you’re working with juveniles you’re working with people that have already committed crimes. And knowingly committing a serious crime is one of those lines in life that’s hard to cross the first time and equally hard to cross back from. If the money being spend on rehabilitation was instead being spent on the children who are going to grow up to be future criminals, I think it would be much more effective.
I’m a prison guard but I rather my taxes were being spend on schools and libraries and rec centers and health clinics then being spent on more prisons.
Yep, the best method of rehabilitation is having there not be any criminals in the first place.
Convince young kids that they have options, and they’ll turn out a lot different.
Just as a guess, I’d hazard that isolating them in a pool consisting of other lawbreakers, keeping them there for months or years on end, then releasing them with an official track record that makes subsequent legitimate employment difficult would not be a resounding success.
Ditto what Qadgop said.
IME, a high percentage of jail detainees (at least in my state, and I believe throughout the U.S.) have either drug/alcohol dependency issues or mental health issues or, not infrequently, both. IME, if we measure successful rehabilitation as corrolating with a lack of recidivism, then successful rehabilitation is predicated to a measurable extent on access to appropriate support services to deal with chemical dependency or mental health.
IOW, for the population that offends to support a drug habit or out of anti-social behaviors due to mental disorders (or both), the key to stopping the illegal or anti-social behaviors is to address the underlying cause. But providing those services for detainees or inmates is not a high priority for most states and municipalities.
It should also be mentioned that historically and very broadly speaking, there are two schools of thought on the purpose of prisons: retributive and rehabilitative. Some people believe philosophically that the chief purpose of a corrections system should be to punish offenders, while others think the chief purpose of a corrections system should be to rehabilitate prisoners. So when you ask whether a successful rehabilitative system has been found, it’s worth keeping in mind that some people don’t think that’s the purpose of prisons anyway.
Uh, what kinds of criminals are we talking about, here? I’m kind of guessing there’d be a difference in approaches (and success rates) between say, car thieves and serial killers.
(Plus there’s, y’know, the whole issue of individual personalities and free will n’ stuff.)
People who think it should be retributive, think so because retribution is a proven method of rehabilitation. “You don’t want to go to jail again? Don’t do crime.” It’s no different than grounding your child. You’re doing so in the hope that the negative consequence of his actions will make him have second thoughts when it comes time to try again.
True up to an extent, false to another. Like anything, the carrot and the stick together is probably better than only one of the two (YMMV.)
There’s two others: deterence, which says that you should make punishments public and severe enough to deter other potential criminals from committing crimes; and segregation, which says the prisons benefit society as a whole by removing criminals from the general population.
Whether it is in fact a “proven” method of rehabilitation is very much an open question. Many of those in favor of a rehabilitative system hold those opinions because they believe punishment alone is NOT rehabilitative.
It’s an age-old philosophical question: If you harshly punish a criminal, do you create a penitent law-abiding citizen or a more hardened criminal? The extent of this on-going debate certain would prevent me from agreeing even in the most general terms that punitive systes are “proven” to rehabilitate.
That seems to be the only thing that is quantitatively known. Old people don’t commit as many crimes as young people.
In a sense, that concept has been put into effect with minimum sentancing laws, three strikes and you’re out rules and “life without parole”. The problem is that prisons are very expensive to build and maintain. Now we are getting to the point where many prisons are huge geriatric wards. We are spending a lot of money incarcerating people who are almost incapable of committing crimes. I’m not suggesting an answer but it is a problem that we will be hearing a lot more of as the population ages.
Oh man, that is so true. A few more years of practice in my current job and I’ll be eligible to sit for the geriatrics specialty boards! Woo hoo! Another credential! :rolleyes:
Seriously, we have to figure out a better way to deal with the non-violent elderly folks. Our system has only 64 infirmary beds serving 23,000 inmates, and we need a lot of those beds for short-term admissions, like recovery from surgery, or a 10 day course of IV antibiotics. Instead they’re filled with guys who still have years to serve, yet they will never get from bed to toilet without an assist from a health care aide. At a cost to state taxpayers of over $100,000 a year.
One oncoming problem is the pedophile problem: Right now we have 6 who have finished their sentences, but have not been released, because they are deemed to be unsafe. That number is only going to go up and up and up and up.
How did sending them to Australia work? (That’s not a flip question - I’m actually curious about the answer.) I mean, it hasn’t been so long, and Australia doesn’t seem to be especially crime-ridden - one assumes that at some point rehabilitation did actually occur, right? I’m sure it’s all much more complicated than that, though.
‘Meeting victim cuts criminal reoffending’ - however, no stats are given.
In a slightly more thoughtful take on ‘Restorative Justice’, Confronting the perpetrators, The New Statesman reports mixed results:
Both articles, however, report that regardless of the effect on the offender, the victims experience catharsis by being able to express their hurt.
Here’s a thread where I tried to explain more about the purposes of prisons: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=6446569&postcount=58
**Jodi’s ** right, though, the two most popular jusifications are indeed rehabilitation and retribution.
I’ll point out the obvious - all those criminals who were sent to Australia are now dead (transportation ended in 1868). We can assume their contribution to Australia’s current crime rate is minimal. Unless you theorizing there’s a genetic component to crime then there’s no reason Australia should have any different a crime rate than an equivelant society.
I’ll point out the obvious - all those criminals who were sent to Australia are now dead (transportation ended in 1868). We can assume their contribution to Australia’s current crime rate is minimal. Unless you theorizing there’s a genetic component to crime then there’s no reason Australia should have any different a crime rate than an equivelant society.