Bailey V, The Rise and Fall of the Rehabilitative Ideal, 1895–1970
| Published date | 01 April 2021 |
| Date | 01 April 2021 |
| Author | Lynsey Black |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520941925 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Bailey V, The Rise and Fall of the Rehabilitative Ideal, 1895–1970, Routledge:
London, 2019; 588 pp., ISBN 9780367077099, 9780367077112,
9780429022203, £125 (hb), £39.99 (pb), from £20 (ebook)
Victor Bailey’s The Rise and Fall of the Rehabilitative Ideal, 1895–1970 takes as
its focus the criminological narrative that through the twentieth century the reha-
bilitative ideal rose to great prominence, before crashing and burning for a
period from the 1970s. Bailey takes this nugget of common sense and exposes
it to scrutiny, finding that the rehabilitative ideal was not so well-entrenched
or all-encompassing as many have supposed. As Zedner (2002) has cautioned,
the rehabilitative ideal was only ever an ‘ideal’.
Rise and Fall zeroes in on the role of the judiciary in dialogue with prison
administrators and civil servants, with judges acting as a persistent moderating
influence on reformist zeal. The book investigates the essential but often over-
looked impact of judicial responses to reform, both in the sense of judicial opinion
on proposed legislation and in the day-to-day shaping of sentencing policy by
individual judges. One refrain throughout is the degree to which positivist-
minded reformers butted heads with retributivist judges.
Bailey’s contention is that we have exaggerated the dominance of the ‘reha-
bilitative ideal’ as an organising concept. He warns of accepting official rhetoric,
and of restricting our view to the post-sentence period. This would seem to be a
fairly uncontroversial position, yet it is not necessarily the norm within scholar-
ship. That it is an ongoing reality, however, is clear. During my time as an intern
with the Irish Penal Reform Trust, the Irish Prison Service took to complaining
that prison governors could hardly hang a ‘No Vacancies’ sign on the front door
of prisons. At a time of an overcrowding crisis, the agency acknowledged the
problem, but drew attention to a bigger landscape in which there was plenty of
blame to go around. There was little that could be done with prison regimes,
after all, when the courts continued to send people in their droves into an already
over-crowded system. In Rise and Fall, Bailey’s inclusion of the courts alongside
consideration of the prisons, reveals greater insight into the operation of penal
policy.
In crafting his analysis, Bailey draws on a wide range of sources with the inten-
tion of peering behind ministerial claims to assess the reality behind the rhetoric.
The chapters are informed not only by official policy statements, but also by sta-
tistics which demonstrated how new policies were wielded in the hands of judges,
as well as the voices of prisoners themselves. Crucially, Rise and Fall offers an
example of the importance of historical perspectives and rigorous scholarship in
the field of punishment and society.
Bailey begins his inquiry with Gladstone’s 1895 Departmental Committee on
Prisons and the two decades which followed, a period marked as the point at which
positivism found its way into English penal policy. By 1895, after almost a century
of the penitentiary, faith in its capacity to deter was waning. However, Bailey does
290 Punishment & Society 23(2)
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