Abstract
The dominant view in the academic literature on punishment over the last thirty years has been that penal rehabilitation has had its day.1 Rehabilitation, the reader would gather, is over, and in its wake ‘just deserts’ theory vies with a new utilitarianism based on risk-management technology to take its place as the dominant penal philosophy of modern societies. Yet despite its much-heralded death, there is clearly a good deal of rehabilitative work going on in the criminal justice systems of modern Western states.2 Furthermore, there has been increasing interest in the case for the abolition of punishment, and some of the alternatives to punishment being canvassed have a strongly rehabilitative element.3 For this reason, now seems a good time to attempt an assessment of the moral value of penal rehabilitation. We will be asking about the proper role of rehabilitation in the criminal justice system, and looking at the extent to which it deserves to be resuscitated. In particular, we will be concerned with a moral critique of rehabilitation: namely, that rehabilitation is incompatible with a proper respect for the moral agency of offenders. Our key question will be: is rehabilitation a welcome antidote to the condemnation or control offered by the other main penal philosophies; or should it be rejected as a condescending and disempowering approach to offenders?
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Notes
See for instance, F. A. Allen (1981), The Decline of the Rehabilitative Ideal (London: Yale University Press).
G. Robinson (2008), ‘Late Modern Rehabilitation: The Evolution of a Penal Strategy’, Punishment and Society 10, 429–45;
P. Priestley and M. Vanstone (eds) (2010), Offenders or Citizens? Readings in Rehabilitation (Cullompton: Willan).
For the philosophical case for abolitionism, see, for example, D. Boonin (2008), The Problem of Punishment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press);
and D. Golash (2005), The Case Against Punishment: Retribution, Prevention and the Law (New York: New York University Press). For a strongly rehabilitative alternative to punishment,
see J. Braithwaite (1989), Crime, Shame and Reintegration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Home Office (1990), Crime, Justice and Protecting the Public (London: HMSO).
This passage is cited in M. Tonry and David P. Farrington (1995), ‘Strategic Approaches to Crime Prevention’, Crime and Justice: A Review of Research 19, 1–20.
Michael S. Moore, (1987), ‘The Moral Worth of Retribution’, in F. Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, Character and the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 179–219, at pp. 215–6.
H. Morris (1968), ‘Persons and Punishment’, Monist 52, 475–501.
See P. F. Strawson (1986), ‘Freedom and Resentment’, in G. Watson (ed.), Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 59–80.
Cf., for example, the Strawsonian point of view developed in R. Jay Wallace (1994), Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (London: Harvard University Press).
C. Korgaard (1996), ‘Creating the Kingdom of Ends: Responsibility and Reciprocity in Personal Relations’, in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 188–201, pp. 190–1.
For the idea that valuable relationships might be in part constituted by the demands they make on participants, see, for example, S. Scheffler (1997), ‘Relationships and Responsibilities’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 26, 189–209, esp. pp. 200–1.
R. A. Duff (2001), Punishment, Communication and Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 81.
For this characterization of trust, see K. Jones (1996), ‘Trust as an Affective Attitude’, Ethics 107, pp. 4–25.
On the notion of misrecognition, see, for example, A. Honneth (2007), Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press).
C. Taylor (1985), ‘Atomism’, in Philosophical Papers Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 187–210, esp., for example, 195.
M. Sandel (1982), Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
This perspective underpins much of the work of James Kelman. See, for instance, his novel: Kelman (1994), How Late It Was, How Late (London: Secker and Warburg).
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© 2010 Christopher Bennett
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Bennett, C. (2010). Punishment and Rehabilitation. In: Ryberg, J., Corlett, J.A. (eds) Punishment and Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230290624_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230290624_4
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