What is it about?
The book explores what I saw as a yawning gap between intention and outcome in the treatment of the adult offender. In 1895 the Gladstone Committee on Prisons recommended that reformation should be combined with punishment. Thereafter, courts were told to impose prison sentences, and make them longer, in the belief that this would help offenders’ rehabilitation, which was in time promoted to be Prison Rule number 1: “The purpose of the training and treatment of convicted prisoners shall be to encourage and assist them to lead a good and useful life” (Prison Rules, 1964). What went wrong with this rehabilitative paradigm? For a start, the judges had their own views on the punitive tariff. They remained remarkably retributive in approach, and suspicious of measures that abandoned the just desert between crime and punishment. Strangely, the criminal courts are a part of the penal system which scholars have consistently neglected. In the prisons themselves, the speed of change was glacial, in part because the prison estate was old and difficult to adapt to new ends, in part because of prison overcrowding, especially post-1945. It all meant that the rehabilitative ideal was honored more in the breach than the observance.
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Why is it important?
There are two themes in the book which only slowly revealed themselves to me. One is the role of the judiciary in the vast abatement of imprisonment between the 1880s and the 1930s. Nothing less than a recalibration of the tariff of punishment occurred over these fifty years, leading to a precipitous decline in the use of imprisonment and a consequent fall in the numbers imprisoned. Teasing out the reasons for this judicial activism became a focus of the early chapters of the book. This narrative has salience for a present-day judiciary which too readily declares powerlessness in the face of an ever-expanding prison population. The second theme is the death penalty, which assumed a place in the book I had not anticipated. Only gradually did I shed the normative view that capital punishment does not fit with a standard history of penal policy. Rather, I was ever more struck by the long shadow the gallows cast over the entire penal landscape. It became evident to me that omitting this penalty from a history of penal policy and administration was, to use the old saw, Hamlet without the prince.
Perspectives
I hope readers of the book will come away with the following considerations in mind. There is nothing wrong in principle with the rehabilitative aim: it has surely contributed to the improvement in the living conditions of prisoners over the years. Yet Winston Churchill anticipated the modern critique of penal measures when he wrote in 1910: there is “a great danger of using smooth words for ugly things.” This book is a caution against the smooth rhetoric of rehabilitation, especially when it leads to false promises, illiberal measures, and longer incarceration than the crime deserves. If rehabilitation is to have any role in our penal practice, and I believe it still should, it must be offered as a voluntary ancillary (whether in the form of education, work experience, or drug rehabilitation) to the tariff sentence for the crime.
Professor Victor Bailey
University of Kansas
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Rise and Fall of the Rehabilitative Ideal, 1895–1970, April 2019, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.4324/9780429022203.
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