Question

Rehabilitation

There is considerable disagreement about the effectiveness of rehabilitation. In Chapter 14 of the text the authors note that studies have shown both little and much hope for the resurgence correctional rehabilitation. Research the issue, discuss the background of rehabilitation, its successes and failures and the outlook for the future. Instructions for Writing Your Paper Write a 2 page APA style paper. Only the body of the paper will count toward the word requirement (title page and references are in addition to the 2 pages) In your paper, cite at least 2-3 references using the APA style guide format for in-text citation.

Please No Plagiarism!!!! In your own words!!!!

Answer 1

Rehabilitation may be defined as the act of restoring someone to normal life through training and therapy after imprisonment, addiction so that they become productive members of society. Rehabilitation programs are designed to help inmates in prison to more easily adjust to conditions outside the prison once they are released. They allow inmates to maintain contact with individuals or organizations that exist beyond the confines of the prison walls thus making reintegration easier once release happens. In-prison rehabilitation programs include adult education courses, religious services, mental and physical health programs, job skills workshop etc that empower inmates to deal with common challenges that they may face upon release. Thus rehabilitation programs are not only a humane response to criminal justice but they also help reduce recidivism and lower incarceration costs. This inturn benefits offenders themselves and society as a whole. Rehabilitation therefore is the central goal of the correctional system.

Rehabilitation was a central feature of corrections in the first half of the twentieth century. It's favorability however declined in the 1970s and 1980s but has regained favor in recent years. Feeley and Rubin (1998) show that there was a tremendous rise in prisoner's rights litigation starting in the mid-1960s and that a leading goal of this litigation was to promote rehabilitative services in prison. Useem and Poehler (2008) used inmate level strategy data to document the percentage of inmates who reported participation in educational programs between 1974 and 2000. They found that participation in academic programs actually increased between 1974 and the late 1980s, but declined after 1991. The first prisons in the U.S. were modelled off of a range of rehabilitative regimes, ranging from isolation and silent reflection to hard labor and physical discipline ( Morris and Rothman 1995). With the decline of prison labor and birth of the progressive era, prison officials began instead to talk about rehabilitation as the process of transforming inmates into (white and male ) ideal citizens who were able to govern themselves ( McLennan 2008). It was during this time that one prominent prison sociologist argued that rather than focusing on re-socialization, the best way of rehabilitation was to teach inmates how to productively use their social and leisure time ( Clemmer 1940). However, with the emergence of psychology as a professional field, inmate programs became increasingly focused on targeted clinical interventions, that is apart from educational classes and vocational training, counseling programs, rehabilitative institutional environments and pharmacological as well as surgical options for the treatment of criminality ( Martinson 1974) became the correctional facilities administered by the authorities.

The effectiveness of corrective rehabilitation measures in promoting short-term behavioral change, or even suppressing negative behavior depends on specific conditions being in place. These conditions for punishment to be effective will not exist in any justice system. It follows that policies and programs that focus on rehabilitating offenders will have a greater chance of success in preventing crime and improving community safety. Rehabilitation in terms of psychological treatments such as psychodynamic psychotherapy, behavior modification, cognitive behavioral therapy, group counseling and psychodrama all take advantage of the significant therapeutic opportunities that arise by looking closely at prisoner's social functioning and day-to-day interactions. They actively encourage offenders to assume responsibility not only for their own behavior, but for that of others as well. In recent years, correctional interventions have, at times, become more punitive and have sought to achieve recidivism by deterring offenders rather than by changing them. After considerable research, the evidence is clear: these deterrence-oriented programs do not work to reduce recidivism (Cullen and Gendreau; Cullen et al., Petersilia and Turner). Based on the work of Canadian psychologists Don Andrews, James Bonta, and Paul Gendreau effectiveness of rehabilitation programs depends on two factors: first, treatment should focus on changing those factors that are most strongly associated with or predict recidivism. Second, they hypothesized that rehabilitation programs that worked to reduce recidivism should share common features. Thus, it made sense to investigate what distinguished programs that decreased re-offending from those that did not.

Perhaps the most important challenge for correctional rehabilitation is whether the emerging knowledge base on effective rehabilitation will be used or ignored. Implementing effective programs can be a difficult task when resources are limited, staffing is poor and not conducted according to professional standards, and when leaders of this system are antagonistic to research knowledge.

References:

Corrections, Rehabilitation and Criminal Justice in the United States: 1800-1970/ Corrections - Corrections and Juvenile Justice - EKU

Rehabilitation in the Punitive Era: The Gap between Rhetoric and Reality in U.S. Prison Programs

Rehabilitation facts, information, pictures/ Encyclopaedia.com articles about Rehabilitation