3 - Rehabilitation

Question 1

What is rehabilitation?

Answer 1

An attempt to restore the individual to the person they were before the ‘crime’ was committed.

Question 2

What are the fundamental beliefs about rehabilitation?

Answer 2

Offenders are different from ‘normal’ people and this difference is directly linked to their offending behaviour.

We can positively alter/‘normalise’ people through social engineering and we have the right to do so

Punishment and imprisonment can speed up this restoration/alteration of the offender.

Question 3

Criticisms of Rehabilitation?

Answer 3

Crime’ is not an ‘illness’ or ‘disease’ but a social construction and wrongdoers may not be that different from law-abiding people.

Rehabilitation unfair as sentences can be indeterminate/disproportionately long (Hudson 1996)

On empirical grounds rehabilitation has historically proved largely ineffective

Concerns that programmes within the current What Works agenda (cognitive defects and deficient thinking) individualise, responsibilise and ‘other’ law breakers as cognitively different, whilst ignoring wider problematic social circumstances and structural divisions, such as poverty, sexism and racism.