Criminal Rehabilitation

Prison is just a place where criminals get a good spanking and endless lectures on behavior until they can learn how to be righteous. In colonial America, criminals were treated in much the same way as they were in England at that time, with punishments ranging from lashings, confinement in stocks, and public brandings for minor offenses to hanging for more serious crimes-including theft (Wright, 2007). Many people are surprised to learn that the use of prisons as a form of punishment and rehabilitation was an American innovation (Farabee, 2005). On average, incarceration costs about $22,000 per year: to lock someone away for ten years costs, on average, about $220, 000; a shorter sentence with emphasis on re-education and rehabilitation would be cheaper and more effective (Fauteck, 2006). Rehabilitation seems like a good method that can help inmates get a new lease on life, and become good productive citizens. Criminal rehabilitation works to reduce criminal recidivism, and it’s a cost-efficient form of crime prevention (Fauteck, 2006). Rehabilitation is often theorized as an approach distinct from reform: that is, as a particular style of correctional intervention and a product or correlate of a particular historical context (Raynor & Robinson, 2005).
American prisons have been charged with the responsibility of accomplishing a nearly impossible task: the transformation of convicted felons, including society’s most violent and recalcitrant criminals, into law-abiding citizens (Wright, 2007). Isolation from social connections with economic value further embeds offenders within a criminal social world (in prison and again on the street), which has long-term effects on inmates’ ability to integrate into mainstream communities; no matter how progressive prison-based vocational training courses seem to be, the American system of correctional “isolation” cannot accomplish, to a significant degree, its goal of offender rehabilitation and community integration

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