Taking rehabilitation seriously
| Author | Francis T. Cullen |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474510385973 |
| Published date | 01 January 2012 |
| Date | 01 January 2012 |
| Subject Matter | Book Review Essay |
Book Review Essay
Punishment & Society
14(1) 94–114
! The Author(s) 2012
Taking rehabilitation
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seriously
DOI: 10.1177/1462474510385973
pun.sagepub.com
Creativity, science, and the challenge of offender change
Francis T. Cullen
University of Cincinnati, USA
Jo Brayford, Francis Cowe, and John Deering (eds), What Else Works? Creative Work with Offenders,
Willan Publishing: Cullomptom, Devon, UK, 2010; 290 pp.: 9781843927662, $39.95 (pbk)
Peter Raynor and Gwen Robinson, Rehabilitation, Crime and Justice (revised and updated edn),
Palgrave Macmillan: Hampshire, UK, 2009; 214 pp.: 13:9780230232488, $29.00 (pbk)
Bonita M. Veysey, Johnna Christian, and Damian J. Martinez (eds), How Offenders Transform
Their Lives, Willan Publishing: Cullomptom, Devon, UK, 2009; 225 pp.: 9781843925088, $38.50
(pbk)
Dedication: This essay is dedicated to the memory of Don Andrews who passed
away on October 22, 2010. Through his science, collaboration with colleagues, and
practice in agencies, Don attempted to create a theory of correctional intervention
capable of improving the lives of offenders. Don’s sharp mind and large heart left
the field of corrections—and, indeed, those he touched in his daily life—far better
off. He will be sorely missed.
Between 1968 and 1972 – my days as a college undergraduate – faith in rehabili-
tation experienced a radical transformation in the United States and elsewhere.
During this time, I became a psychology major and visited offenders in the local
hospital for the criminally insane in hopes that I might help to save them from their
plight. By 1972, however, I was a graduate student in sociology, had embraced
labeling theory, and mistrusted the State to ‘do good’. A year later, I was sitting in
Richard Cloward’s class at Columbia University where we discussed the role of
seemingly benevolent social welfare ideologies in controlling deviant and poor
populations (see, for example, Kittrie, 1971; Piven and Cloward, 1971). Not long
Cullen: Taking Rehabilitation Seriously
95
thereafter, I interviewed with Robert Martinson who, in the aftermath of his classic
1974 ‘nothing works’ essay, was undertaking a new assessment of treatment effec-
tiveness (see Martinson, 1979). Lacking computer skills, I was not hired as his
research assistant. Regardless, when I started my first academic position at
Western Illinois University in 1976, I remained persuaded that state efforts to
‘do good’ were, by and large, harmful. Indeed, when a colleague at Western
Illinois – a kindly social worker – angrily confronted me one day about telling
students that correctional rehabilitation was a sham, I literally held up Martinson’s
article and told him that ‘the research shows that treatment does not work’.
My wife, Paula Dubeck, accuses me of not liking change – which is one reason,
I reply, that she is still around! But when it came to rehabilitation, I did, for once,
change. Starting in the summer of 1979, I became convinced not that rehabilitation
was without serious faults but that the alternative to rehabilitation would be much
worse. This change of mind was not comfortable, because it placed me at odds with
virtually the entire criminological community (Gottfredson, 1979). Regardless, in
1982, Karen Gilbert and I published Reaffirming Rehabilitation, where I first shared
systematically my sentiments on the dangers of turning away from treatment. The
book was well received, but I never sensed that, at the time, it persuaded too many
American criminologists to see the wisdom of my message. I was heartened, how-
ever, when I received an envelope bearing a Canadian postmark that contained a
complimentary note about the volume from Paul Gendreau. It was through Paul
that I discovered that Canadian psychologists did not find my views on rehabili-
tation so idiosyncratic and contrarian. Over the years, this association provided me
with a unique appreciation for how Paul and his compatriots built a powerful
treatment paradigm. This understanding of their scholarship and related efforts –
some might say this ‘bias’ – informs the review that follows.
Three decades after the publication of Reaffirming Rehabilitation, there is – as
the books being assessed here reveal – a renewed enthusiasm for the rehabilitation
enterprise. My goal in this essay is to place these contemporary contributions in an
appropriate historical and intellectual context. As will be shown, the status of
correctional treatment came to hinge on the narrow issue of program effectiveness,
a challenge that the Canadian scholars took up successfully. Under the umbrella of
the term ‘creative corrections’, there is now a growing movement – prominently
featured in the books reviewed in this essay – that seeks to replace the Canadians’
paradigm in favor of interventions rooted more in desistance theory and research.
I am skeptical, but not dismissive, of these efforts. My main message is that new
ventures into offender treatment are important, but they would profit by learning
from, rather than by attacking, the Canadians’ approach to designing an effective
rehabilitation intervention.
Reframing the attack on rehabilitation
Today, in an era of evidence-based corrections (MacKenzie, 2006), much of the
debate about rehabilitation hinges on whether treatment programs are effective in
96
Punishment & Society 14(1)
reducing recidivism. This focus can be traced to Robert Martinson’s systematic
assessment of the program evaluation literature from 1945 to 1967. His account
of the results was famously called the ‘nothing works’ essay because he concluded
that, ‘With few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been
reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism’ (1974: 25, emphasis in
original). This led him to ask, ‘Does nothing work?’ – the answer to which he
suggested was likely in the affirmative (1974: 48). As I revisit below, Martinson’s
study had a crucial influence in reframing the debate over rehabilitation. It consol-
idated complex arguments into a single, simple issue: if treatment programs do not
work, then how can anyone continue to support rehabilitation as the guiding theory
of corrections? Uttering the slogan that ‘nothing works’, as I did to my social worker
colleague, was a powerful way to avoid broader policy concerns and to silence all
argument. Both liberals and conservatives used Martinson’s work in this way.
It is instructive that in the pre-Martinson days of the late 1960s, the rising crit-
icism of offender treatment did not focus mainly on program effectiveness – though,
of course, this was a worry. Rather, the chief concern was with the broader issue of
how court and correctional officials abused the discretion legitimized by the rehabil-
itative ideal. As a social welfare ideology, rehabilitation gave officials virtually
unfettered powers to decide – supposedly based on treatment criteria – who went
to prison (more troubled offenders) and how long they stayed there (until they were
cured). Conservatives had long been skeptical of this ‘medical model’ notion
because they believed that judges and parole officials undercut deterrence and inca-
pacitation by their sparing use of imprisonment and by their proclivity to parole
dangerous inmates prematurely. Liberals also had realized the problems with cor-
rectional rehabilitation but believed that they were fixable – a position they forsook
in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. At this specific historical juncture, they suddenly
abandoned what they now called ‘state enforced rehabilitation’, claiming that it was
inherently coercive and beyond reform. The central critique was that judges used
discretion to sentence unjustly and that parole boards’ decisions were similarly
discriminatory or simply incompetent. While incarcerated under indeterminate
terms, inmates were told not to self-actualize but to obey their custodians or
never earn release. The key observation was that politics, bureaucratic interests,
and ignorance most often guided officials’ discretionary decision making, not a
genuine concern for offenders’ treatment and well-being. As Rothman (1980) elo-
quently put it, ‘conscience’ was corrupted by ‘convenience’.
Let me now return to the summer of 1979. While attending a National
Endowment for the Humanities program led by Gresham Sykes, I had a rather
startling insight. I wondered why I – and so many other criminologists – had so
rapidly and in concert rejected correctional rehabilitation. Having read about par-
adigm shifts in science (Kuhn, 1970), sociology (Gouldner, 1970), and criminology
(Cole, 1975), I could not attribute this near-unanimous and simultaneous forfeiture
of treatment to the judicious reading of the cold hard facts about rehabilitation.
Something must have caused us all to think the same way at the same time. In brief,
my sense was that we were members of a scholarly generation who, due to the
Cullen: Taking Rehabilitation Seriously
97
tumultuous events of the time (e.g. Civil Rights protests, Vietnam War, Watergate
scandal), had come to mistrust state power and thus the ideologies that justified its
use (Cullen and Gilbert, 1982).
This reflexivity allowed me to pause intellectually and consider whether my
almost unthinking rejection of rehabilitation was as wise as it had seemed. As I
probed my views and the broader issues, I concluded that the liberals’ embrace of
due process rights in place of rehabilitation was a mistake (Cullen and Gilbert,
...
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