Most people may think of prisons as nothing more than facilities where criminals are incarcerated and deprived of their freedoms while serving a sentence for a crime. While this is true, the concept of imprisonment is also intended to rehabilitate the prisoners.
The basic idea of rehabilitation through imprisonment is that a person who has been incarcerated will never want to be sent back to prison after they have been set free.
Idealogically, rehabilitation is a very sound goal for punishment. It's pleasant and beautiful to imagine the successful general rehabilitation of society's criminals. If only adult criminals could be successfully rehabilitated, then the phenomenon of crime could be all but eliminated, and criminal offenses restricted from then on to juvenile delinquency and the occasional act of passion. Ah, if only. But a rehabilitative program which lowers the number or de-escalates the seriousness of repeat crimes is usually seen as unacceptable.
As a result, one can have a "successful" program with high rates of recidivism. In one study of a family therapy program geared to hard-core delinquents, 30 adolescents each with 20 previous adjudicated offenses , were matched with a control group of 44 delinquents with similar offense histories. At the end of a month follow-up, 60 percent of the family therapy group had committed a new offense. This looked like failure.
But then, we see that 93 percent of the control group which didn't get the therapy had been so charged. If this were not a political arena, rehabilitation would be judged against the alternatives proposed by those who reject it. Measuring recidivism is further complicated by other contemporary events. Simply residing in some communities increases the likelihood of contact with the criminal justice system and being labeled a recidivist.
Nearly half, 46 percent of boys in some areas will appear in juvenile court during their teen years. Among young black men in certain parts of the country, seven out of ten can anticipate being arrested at least once.
Though this may suggest failure, it is not necessarily a true measure of individual criminal behavior. But the NAS Panel identified the elements it saw as crucial to successful programs. Where there is a wide adversity of strong alternatives, recidivism can be lowered.
Where there is little choice, recidivism remains the same or increases. This was what University of Southern California sociologist, Lamar Empey found in this famous "Provo Project" which showed that recidivism rates fell significantly for youthful offenders placed in community-based programs, when compared with youth in state institutions.
It was reiterated a decade later by Harvard's Center for Criminal Justice, when researchers studied recidivism among youthful delinquents placed in community treatment as opposed to state reform schools. Serious delinquents placed in the community with no treatment showed no lower rates of recidivism than reform school youth, and in many cases did worse. Better performance wasn't simply a matter of maturation, but seemed related to the number and quality of treatment options.
The intensity and integrity of the treatment was crucial to lowering recidivism rates. Though this may seem self-evident, it's foreign to corrections. The corrections establishment made up, for the most part, of administrators, former guards, or political appointees with little background in such arcane subjects as social deviance and recidivism, has never been more than faintly interested in rehabilitation.
Even programs ballyhooed as rehabilitative, such as the much maligned "furlough," are tolerated not so much for their rehabilitative effect, as for the fact that they provide incentives which lead to smoother prison management. Corrections is a system of extremes - debilitating prisons vs.
To use a medical analogy, it would be like asking a doctor for relief from a headache, and being told there are only two treatments - an aspirin or a lobotomy. More often, it's like going to the same doctor with a broken arm or an acute appendicitis and being told the same two treatments, an aspirin or a lobotomy, are all that's available.
Criminal behavior is no more unitary than any other individual or social malady. If the treatment options are so narrow as to be irrelevant, the likelihood of success is diminished. The simple mathematics along suggest that the chances of fitting the treatment to the individual offender are enhanced when there are more choices.
In Massachusetts, for example, recidivism fell among former reform school youth in those regions of the state where a wide range of community-based alternatives were created,. Where there was no such array of services, recidivism remained the same or increased. It was not a matter of identifying any single regimen which worked for all offenders. Rather, success was in the mix of models.
The common thread which wound its way through the most effective programs of whatever type, was whether or not they had close ties to the community. Interestingly, such services, alone or in combination, were no more expensive than state reform schools. In , Gendreau and Ross published a survey of over studies on rehabilitation from , many of which used mathematical methodology not available to earlier researchers. They concluded with no equivocation:. What specific techniques worked best?
For the almost 50 years since Gilligan first set foot in that prison in , he has dedicated his work to people convicted of violent offenses.
His work revolves around the ethos that comprehensive rehabilitation, including mental health care, should be available to all offenders and is key to preventing violence. The U. With the population peaking in the last several years, bipartisan support for limited reforms has slowly emerged. While some legislators have been stunned by sticker shock at the state level, where corrections expenses have strained budgets, others have called out the enormous racial disparities in the criminal justice system that disproportionately ensnare low-income people of color.
To Gilligan and others seeking to reduce the number of people in U. In the early s, U. District Judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered the Massachusetts Department of Corrections to fund the establishment of a team of psychiatrists in the prisons to stem the growing violence behind bars.
Bridgewater is a prison that houses people charged with or convicted of crimes who are awaiting medical evaluation or services. Working with colleagues at Harvard Medical School, his alma mater, and with the support of the court order, Gilligan set up a mental health service at Bridgewater in Today, while prison mental health services have become more commonplace, the vast majority of prisons and jails in the U.
Because the prison mental health programs in Massachusetts were built on the back of a court order that forced the state to fund them, they were constantly under fire by the Department of Corrections and tough-on-crime politicians who felt they were a poor investment. Gilligan pleaded with judges to keep the programs going, but after 15 years, he lost the fight. The court ceased to uphold the order that created a contract between the Department of Corrections and Harvard Medical School, and the department eliminated the contract.
Working with a cellblock of 60 men, Gilligan ran intensive programming 12 hours a day, six days a week, all for people convicted of violent crimes. The programs involved group therapy, meetings with crime victims who talked about the impact of violence on their lives, and theater and writing classes.
Gilligan and his team tracked the men after their participation in the program and release from jail. For those who spent two months in the program, the likelihood of committing another violent crime after release dropped by Overall, the recidivism rate of participants dropped by He continued to run the program for 10 years. Hennessey was known for being a progressive who supported rehabilitation programs, and he was accused during his reelection campaign of being soft on crime.
0コメント