Rehabilitating Myths

Those who are in support of prison-based rehabilitation will often cite stories of prisoners finding success after their time incarcerated, usually as a consequence of proper education, job training, or focused therapy. Now I am not attempting to refute that rehabilitation done correctly can improve an average individual’s life or help them overcome deeply personal issues. There is an abundance of evidence that rehabilitation is not just helpful but necessary in reforming people who’ve fallen into bad times. You can’t expect someone to get better without support, but with similar stories that occur in a prison setting, they are often not reflective of reality and focus on smaller testing groups that don’t translate into larger-reaching programs. 

Criminologist Joan Petersilia writes in support of prison rehabilitation in her essay “Beyond the prison bubble,” originally published in The Wilson Quarterly. Petersilia claims that rehabilitation is a key in putting an end to the ever growing prison population. The main idea lies in a belief that if “effective” programs are implemented there can be a 15 to 20 percent reduction in recidivism. Although already today many places including the U.S and abroad have a form modern prison rehabilitation service, recidivism rate still reaches up to 60% worldwide. It is possible that not all of these programs might fit Petesilias definition of an effective, though we can look at a specific modern program she advocates for, and how it ultimately will not bring her idealistic outcome. 

A major point made by Petersilia is in reference to the informational advantage prisons have in creating new programs after past failures, one of them being the risk-need-responsivity (RNR) model. RNR works by using tools to match prisoners into specific programs based on their needs. Though similar programs to the RNR model have been attempted before and the outcome was no were close to Petersillia’s estimation . Looking at Greg Newbold’s piece “Criminal Reoffending and the Failure of Corrections: Rehabilitating Criminals Ain’t That Easy,” these programs do not fit well when implemented into the prison system. He cites a specific IOM program that worked similar to Petersilias RNR model by putting prisoners into individual treatments and facilities based on their personal and criminal history. This program was meant to create a ¼ to ⅓ improvement in correctional efficiency. The program alone could have been effective, but underlying problems with adding it into the prison system lead to its failure. 

IOMS and procedures associated with IOM, such as constructing a sentence management plan, are complicated and time-consuming and are not fully understood by staff. This leads to a large number of errors and omissions in data entry and assessment information. Approximately 1/3 of computerised assessments are overridden by staff because they think the assessments are wrong. This results in inmates being given treatment that is inconsistent with their identified needs. Where assessment data are available and adhered to, resources seldom exist to address the needs identified.

Prisons are not rehabilitation centers, and they can’t easily change into them. Intense amounts of training and preparation must go into creating rehab centers, and reforming national and local prison proctor would not only be difficult but nearly impossible to achieve. This is not only due to the environment and program implementation itself, but because of the resources involved. 

Those like Petersilia  argue that large quantities of money should be given to prisons and managed into rehabilitation services. The reasoning behind this is to put money and resources into it now rather than pay for it later through prisoner costs, but as Newbold pointed out resources are often not available as needed for these programs. Prisons don’t have the ability to put their resources entirely into rehabilitation in the same way as a rehab center, and Petersilia admits that this is an issue in the process herself in her essay. While discussing the growing use of Intensive supervision programs (ISP),  Pertersilia recalls personally finding out that the resources meant for the program were being siphoned out to other parts of the prison system. 

But as I discovered when I was co-director of the RAND Corporation’s national evaluation of ISPs in the early 1990s, despite all the good intentions, most of the ISP dollars wound up being used to fund more drug testing, parole agent contacts, and electronic monitoring rather than enhanced social services.

The resources Petersilia discusses were not being used in a drastically immorally way, they were being used to sustain what these facilities are meant to be: Prisons. If a facility needs to take out money from another program just to fund their original purpose, it would be reasonable to say extra services like ISP or RNR are more of a burden than an advantage. 

Education is another major part of the rehabilitation argument. It’s an important tool for many in having a successful future, but not all education is equal. The majority of prisoners don’t take advantage of these programs and even in the best of cases, their education almost always ends there. Lucius Couloute describes statistics relating to this in his piece “Getting Back on Course: Educational exclusion and attainment among formerly incarcerated people.” Only 27% of incarcerated attain their GED while in the prison system. And when it comes to further education, which is often needed for a sustainable life, only 9.6% of the formerly incarcerated end up receiving some form of it. These education resources are not the same stepping stone that many in the general public have, with about 42.8% receiving some college education after high school. Education can offer great benefits, but one given in prison is not a desirable one. 

Rehabilitation is a necessary tool in making people better. But trying to merge it with the prison system in hope that it will one day lead to lower recidivism rates and better communities is unhelpful and misguided. The argument for the potential of prison rehabilitation is outweighed by the reality. The programs that do exist are not reaching expectations, and no matter how perfect the service is, prison’s system has not melded well with them in the past. 

References

Couloute, L. (2018, October). “Getting Back on Course: Educational exclusion and attainment among formerly incarcerated people.” Prison Policy Initiative. 

Newbold, G. (2006) “Criminal Reoffending and the Failure of Corrections: Rehabilitating Criminals Ain’t That Easy.”

Petersilia, Joan. “Beyond the prison bubble.” The Wilson Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 1, winter 2011, pp. 50+. Gale Academic OneFile, Accessed 20 Nov. 2022.