Phelps, Michelle. "Rehabilitation in the Punitive Era: The Gap Between Rhetoric and Reality in U.S. Prison Programs". Law & Society Review, Vol.45, No.1 (2011): 33-68.

Phelps, Michelle. "Rehabilitation in the Punitive Era: The Gap Between Rhetoric and Reality in U.S. Prison Programs". Law & Society Review, Vol.45, No.1 (2011): 33-68.

• The rate of incarceration in the USA has grown enormously since the 1970s, reaching 0.9% of the male population and 0.07% of the female population, or 1.6 million total inmates, in 2006. Even more Americans are subject to probation, parole, or other alternatives to imprisonment (33-34).
• This massive increase in incarceration is mostly associated with the introduction of determinant sentencing based on sentencing rubrics and minimum sentencing requirements. Former measures to decrease the prison population, like discretionary parole, have also been abolished (34).
• The forms of punishment being employed in the criminal justice system have also become harsher. In the past decades, the US has introduced chain gangs, become more stringent towards young offenders, introduced especially strict sentences for crimes related to sex or drugs, and created more 'supermax' facilities (34).
• The large-scale increase in incarceration is associated with a change in attitudes towards imprisonment, with attitudes about prisons as rehabilitative have sharply declined in favor of strategies of incapacitation and deterrence. This 'new penology' is much more punitive (34).
• "Summarily put, the 'Big House' that embodied the correctional ideal of melioristic treatment and community reintegration of inmates gave way to a race-divided and violence-ridden "ware house" geared solely to neutralizing social rejects by sequestering them physically from society—in the way that a classical ghetto wards off the threat of defilement posed by the presence of a dishonored group by encaging it within its walls, but in an ambience resonant with the fragmentation, dread, and despair of the post-Fordist hyperghetto" (34, from Wacquant 2001).
• While the change in political rhetoric towards crimes has certainly shifted during this period, there is much less evidence that this change in thinking about prisons has translated into changes in prison practice. The narrative of rehabilitative facilities turning into punitive facilities is troubled by a lack of evidence about the rehabilitative practices of either institution, especially considering evidence that rhetoric rarely translates into action (35, 38).
• According to the standard narrative of prison reform in the USA, the period of the 1950s until the 1970s was the heyday of rehabilitation, based on the opinion that experts could identify and 'treat' criminality through provision of services and medication just like it was any other illness (36).
• The idea of this system was that the rehabilitation ideal would be permanent and that succeeding generations of penitentiary officers would be able to improve its implementation through increasingly sophisticated technologies and techniques (36).
• In the 1970s, the trend radically reversed as rehabilitation became a discredited penological concept, largely by a number of studies showing the ineffectiveness of rehabilitation programs. As the public opinion turned against it, the penal system quickly dropped the concept of rehabilitation and began instead to justify its existence in terms of incapacitating criminals (36).
• During the 1970s, the criticism of the penal system was from all corners, as Democrats attacked the system for allowing 'liberal judges' to interfere with justice to correct racial disparities and Republicans saw indeterminate sentences where release was only achievable by parole as unacceptable. These opinions were synthesized in the Martinson Report of 1974, which concluded that rehabilitation programs were unsuccessful and that release from prison should not longer be conditional on reform (36-37).
• Other scholars argue that broader societal trends were to blame for undermining rehabilitation. Dr. Francis Allen wrote that for rehabilitation to succeed, a society needed a faith in the malleability of humans and a common understanding of what constituted a 'reformed' person. In the 1970s, American society lost both of these traits, as opinions about society became more contentious, criminals were increasingly viewed as 'super-predators', and faith in the power of the welfare state to shape humans was deeply shaken (37).
• During this same time period, politicians also became increasingly involved in the creation of criminal justice policies, which had previously been the purview of penal experts. These politicians adopted popular, and racially-tinged, law and order policies. These policies also took power out of the hands of the judiciary and into legislation, reducing the ability of previous rehabiliatory cultures to affect sentencing (37-38).
• As a result of many of these 'law and order' policies, the prison population increasingly became disproportionately black and hispanic. As a result of overcrowding and increased racial tensions during the 1960s and 1970s, prison gangs along racial lines began to emerge as a serious issue. The prevalence of these violent prison gangs and several high profile prison riots in the 1970s further convinced the public that prisoners were unredeemable (38).
• Changes in the rhetoric surrounding rehabilitation do not necessary translate into practice largely because implementation is still performed according to the habits of institutional employees, who are generally resistant to change. Accordingly, there is evidence that correctional officers, esp. wardens, have continued rehabilitation in American prisons both for reformatory goals and as a method of encourage good inmate behavior (39).
• Penal practices have also been closely shaped by the advent of prisoners' rights legislation in the American judicial system. This legislation began to take off in the 1960s and has been important for reducing overcrowding and improving the conditions needed for rehabilitation programs to be carried out. This may have increased the level of services provided despite trends towards increased punitiveness, especially in the South (39-40).
• In the 1960s, official literature placed the burden of reform on the correctional facility to provide services needed for rehabilitation, whereas current literature places the burden on the inmate to seek out reformatory opportunities. Similar changes have occurred in the attitudes of guards, with previous generations seeing themselves as helping, whereas modern prison guards view their role as limited to maintaining order (40-41).
• Trends in rehabilitation do not appear to directly correlate with the rhetoric employed to describe the penal system, as a study in prisons in Rhode Island has demonstrated an increase in rehabilitative programs from the 1950s to the 1990s, despite the contemporaneous switch to neoliberal conceptions of penology. Other studies have showed this success more widely, some associating it to the success of a control-centered model of prison management (41).
• Almost of these articles and studies like them are too narrow in their definition of rehabilitation programs, leaving out many varieties of opportunities offered to prisoners. Because the government's definition of 'rehabilitation' has changed so much over time, including hard labor and solitary confinement at times, the author uses a broad definitions of 'rehabilitation' as any program designed to reform inmates into models of non-deviant citizens (42).
• Sources of data used in the study are listed on pages 43 and 44.
• If trends towards 'warehousing' prisoners instead of providing rehabilitation are correct, then we would expect to see an increase in the number of general use prison facilities relative to specialized facilities focused on rehabilitation. Evidence shows that general containment facilities were always the majority and no meaningful change has been observed since the 1970s in either number of facilities nor proportion of prisoners held (45-46).
• Prisons employ a variety of people for different tasks. If prisons has become more punitive following the 1970s then it would expected that the proportion of security officers would increase as the numbers of specialized and rehabilitative staff declined. General trends in employment do not reflect this, although there has been a substantial decline the ratio of educational officers to inmates since the 1970s (47-48).
• The number of inmates participating in all varieties of rehabilitative programs has steady increased since the 1970s, including those in academic, vocational, psychological, societal readjustment, and drug treatment programs (49). However, the percentage of total inmates participating in these programs has declined during the same period (50).
• The trend has been steepest in academic programs, which involved 25% of inmates, but now only involve 20%. Levels of participation in drug and alcohol programs and vocational training have experienced the smallest declines (50).
• Inclusion of further data, however, shows that these declines are program participation are actually far smaller than they initially appear, with substantial proportions of inmates continuing to take part (51-52).
• Further surveys conducted in the 1990s and early 2000s show that the range of programs offered by prisons also remains large, with most facilities offering the variety of different rehabilitory programs dealing with social skills, specific aspects of criminality, education, and vocational skills. Although academic programs have been curtailed sharply since the 1990s due to lack of staff, other programs have remained stable or even increased participation since the 1980s (53-55).
• Neither narrative of rehabilitation in US prisons is fully true. The changes in rhetoric regarding prisons in the 1970s have not been reflected in the transformation of prisons into 'warehouses' or the complete curtailing of rehabilitation programs. Similarly, the period from the late 1990s onward has not bee accompanied by a return to greater rehabilitation. Instead, from the 1970s to the early 2000s, participation in prison programs was remained relatively constant as were numbers of most staff involved in rehabilitation, the decline in academic staff being the exception (55-56).
• This study firstly shows that rates of inmate participation in rehabilitory programs were not very high in the 1970s, despite the rhetoric of rehabilitation common during that time, with participation rates roughly the same as the 1990s. This continuation of prison program was likely by maintained by both the organizational mindset of correctional staff and new legal requirements for rehabilitation programs (59-60).
• There is a possibility that this national study of prisons does not reflect actual trends and is simply an amalgamation of conflicting trends at regional levels. A closer examination reveals that most national trends do apply to individual regions, however. The exception is a secondary increase in the inmate-to-staff during the early 1990s, which is almost entirely driven by the South and not reflected in other regions (57).
• Two trends in the American penal system are located within the 1990s: the decline of educational opportunities for prisoners and the concurrently increase in re-entry programs to facilitate reincorporation into the workforce. The first is likely resulting from a general perception of teachers an unnecessary luxury eliminated under the 'tough on crime' programs of the 1990s (60). The increase in re-entry programs likely fulfills a similar role to educational programs, but is seen as more practical and also requires fewer trained staff (61).
• This switch is also consistent with the switch towards a liberal rational-actor model of criminality. Whereas previous educational programs were designed to make up for deficient neighborhood and family environments to counter systemic factors, modern programs focus on increase individual abilities for self-improvement and try to correct for individual deficiencies in judgement, seeing these as the main cause of crime (61-62).