FULL REPORT

Can Prisons Rehabilitate Criminals?	August 4, 1989

Report Outline
Special Focus

Introduction

For most of the 20th century, society put more emphasis on rehabilitating criminals than on punishing them. But in the mid-1970s, with mounting public concern about the threat of crime and growing skepticism about the effectiveness of rehabilitation, Americans began to focus on two other purposes of prison—retribution and public safety. Now, however, prisons have become severely overcrowded, and policy makers are taking another look at rehabilitation and alternative corrections programs.

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Overview

When President Bush introduced his administration's crime-prevention package last May, there was no talk about rehabilitating criminals. Bush's recommendations had a different theme: “lock-them-up-and-throw-away-the -key.”

“A common-sense approach to crime means that if we're going to affect people's behavior,” the president said, “we must have a criminal-justice system in which there is an expectation that if you commit a crime, you will be caught; and if caught, you will be prosecuted; and if convicted, you will do the time. For far too long, a privileged class of violent and repeat offenders have calculated that crime really does pay—that our criminal-justice system is a crapshoot where the risks are worth the rewards. Well, it's time we change the odds—and up the stakes enormously,”

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