We can't identify you with them and we don't share the data with anyone else. Find out more in our privacy policy. Accept cookies Reject cookies. Morris favours a view on which rehabilitative measures may permissibly aim at a global kind of moral improvement. Footnote 55 In this way, moral education imparts on offenders moral knowledge that will help them choose to do what is right.
Footnote 56 This suggests a narrower understanding of the legitimate scope of rehabilitation; rehabilitation should only or at least mainly target moral improvements relevant to the particular sort of criminal activity that has been committed.
Similarly, Duff defends what some see as a rehabilitation-based account of criminal justice aimed at moral improvement Footnote 57 on which it is not permissible for moral improvement to take a focus that is too global or wide-ranging. As with the aims invoked by thin conceptions of rehabilitation, the aim of moral improvement may, on rehabilitation as moral improvement , be proximal to some further aim, such as the promotion of offender wellbeing, the social good, the non-instrumental value of being morally good or the non-instrumental value of becoming morally better , or some combination of these.
It may also be distal to some more immediate aim, such as the promotion of offender empathy, self-control, self-understanding, or introspection. Proponents of rehabilitation, as conceived in rehabilitation as moral improvement , typically assume some non-instrumental value to moral improvement. Rehabilitation as restoration. This could include social and vocational capacities as well as moral ones. On this variant, criminal rehabilitation is in some respects akin to the payment of compensatory damages at tort law; its concern is to bring it about that the offender compensates his victim, pays off a moral debt owed to his victim, corrects the wrong committed, or restores the moral balance between offender and victim.
A third, hybrid variant would understand rehabilitation as aiming at the restoration of both moral and social relationships. Footnote 61 This seems to be the most commonly held variant of the view.
Footnote 67 They explain that. Achieving such a change in attitude may entail the offender agreeing to undergo training, counselling or therapy and, as such, these may all be seen as part of reparative justice. A forced apology or obligatory payment of compensation will not suffice; indeed, it may even be counterproductive in eliciting a genuine change of attitude in the offender. In the previous section, we distinguished five different conceptions of rehabilitation on the basis of their aims or ends.
In relation to the first two conceptions— rehabilitation as anti - recidivism and rehabilitation as harm - reduction —we introduced a condition restricting the means that could be used to achieve the intended aim. In respect of the latter three conceptions— rehabilitation as therapy, rehabilitation as moral improvement, and rehabilitation as restoration —we included no such condition. This is because in respect of the first two conceptions, such a condition was needed to distinguish rehabilitation from incapacitation and deterrence.
In respect of the latter, we do not think a means-based condition is necessary to distinguish rehabilitation from other functions of criminal justice. Nevertheless, some proponents of these latter three conceptions may also wish to impose means-based constraints on what can qualify as rehabilitation—or permissible rehabilitation—and we can distinguish subvariants of these views by reference to the nature and stringency of these constraints.
We have already hinted at such subvariants of rehabilitation as moral improvement. Footnote 71 The change in dispositions in the offender ought to be the result of his autonomous reflection. Hampton, Morris, and Duff all hold that attempts at moral improvement should seek to bring it about that the offender among other things becomes convinced that his actions were wrong, feels guilty about his actions, and resolves not to perform similar actions again.
Such transformations could potentially be produced through, for example, brain washing or conditioning, but these authors reject the use of such means.
Though they reject the label themselves, Hampton, Morris and Duff can—as we have seen—be characterised as proponents of rehabilitation on rehabilitation as moral improvement. However, a more fine-grained characterisation of their views would understand them as proponents of a subvariant of this conception, according to which moral improvement must be sought through rationality-engaging, and not rationality-bypassing, means. The distinction between rationality-engaging and rationality-bypassing interventions might be relevant to other conceptions of rehabilitation too.
Footnote 74 Shaw does not herself commit to any of the particular conceptions of rehabilitation that we delineate above. However, we could imagine that proponents of any of the conceptions that we have outlined might wish to invoke a reason-engagingness requirement that would render certain means incompatible with its conception of rehabilitation. Moving beyond the criminal justice literature, such a requirement has also been advocated in relation to, for example, the treatment of depression, where it is has figured in arguments for preferring psychotherapy to anti-depressants.
There are further distinctions that can be made between subvariants of the different conceptions of rehabilitation based on the means they take to be consistent with permissible rehabilitation.
For example, one of the present authors Douglas has distinguished between perceptual and non-perceptual influences, that is, interventions whose primary motivational effects are mediated by perceptual processes, and interventions where this is not the case.
Footnote 78 Douglas rejects the moral significance of the distinction, but notes that some might argue that, whereas perceptual means to rehabilitation can be permissible, non-perceptual means cannot, because they operate bring about their intended motivational effects in a way that is non-transparent to the recipient, or is difficult for the recipient to monitor, or is irresistible.
Footnote 80 As they understand it, this distinction is not co-extensive with either the distinction between rationality-engaging and rationality-bypassing interventions, or that between perceptual and non-perceptual interventions.
On the one hand, Bublitz and Merkel take perceptual mediation to be necessary, but perhaps not sufficient, for an intervention to qualify as indirect. Among permissible interventions, Bublitz and Merkel mention conscious or direct communication and psychotherapy, while they take impermissible direct interventions to include the administration of psychoactive substances and deep brain stimulation. As with the distinction between rationality-engaging and rationality-bypassing interventions, requirements to engage perception or to employ indirect means may potentially be used to generate further means-based subvariants of each of the conceptions of rehabilitation we identified in Sect.
Delineating the five different ends-based conceptions of criminal rehabilitation identified by our taxonomy, and further means based subvariants, has, we think, at least two payoffs. One payoff is that the taxonomy helps to define the scope of some objections to rehabilitative theories of criminal justice.
Delineating different conceptions of rehabilitation makes it clear which conceptions are, and are not, susceptible to common criticisms of rehabilitation. Footnote 84 Our taxonomy suggests that this objection is more limited in its scope than proponents have seemed to assume. If the objection is based on i , it seems to apply primarily to rehabilitation as therapy , on which rehabilitation presupposes a mental deficit.
Insofar as a mental deficit implies a lack of mental capacity, this view arguably presupposes that the recipient of the rehabilitation is less than fully responsible though this will depend on which incapacities exactly are implied—the objection will have its fullest force in relation to what we called the forensic understanding of rehabilitation as therapy , since, on this understanding, rehabilitation targets precisely those mental capacities that are relevant to criminal responsibility.
Other conceptions of rehabilitation are not vulnerable to this objection, since they do not presuppose any mental incapacity or lack of rational agency. Perhaps rehabilitation as moral improvement and rehabilitation as anti - recidivism presuppose that the target of rehabilitation is flawed in some way.
Footnote 85 However, there is no reason to suppose that the flaw must be a lack of capacity rather than, say, a lack of moral virtue or the presence of immoral motives. She conceives of offenders as responsible moral agents who have acted immorally and to which punishment sends the moral message that they have acted immorally.
Our taxonomy thus clearly shows that we can reject rehabilitation, as characterised by rehabilitation as therapy or certain subvariants thereof, for the reasons proponents of the theoretical objection give—that it fails to treat offenders as morally responsible agents—but deny that these concerns or criticisms apply to other conceptions of rehabilitation and perhaps thereby maintain that rehabilitation on these other conceptions is a legitimate function of criminal justice.
All of the conceptions of rehabilitation that we have introduced including rehabilitation as therapy are compatible with rehabilitation being pursued through rationality-engaging means, such as engaging an offender in rational dialogue. But, as we noted, such a constraint could also be included in other conceptions, including rehabilitation as therapy, giving defenders of rehabilitation a way of avoiding objections based on ii.
A second payoff of our taxonomy is that it helps to draw links with other literatures by suggesting parallels between rehabilitation and other types of intervention. For example, on rehabilitation as anti - recidivism and rehabilitation as harm - reduction , rehabilitation is somewhat similar to some public health interventions, such as behaviour change campaigns intended to protect public health for example, drink driving campaigns, vaccination promotion campaigns , suggesting that literature from public health might fruitfully inform discussions of rehabilitation.
Parallels between criminal justice and public health have already received some attention, but these have focussed on quarantine, Footnote 89 which, since it operates via the imposition of external constraints, is more analogous to incapacitation than rehabilitation.
Other types of public health intervention, such as health promotion campaigns intended to encourage vaccination or social distancing, are more closely analogous to rehabilitation. There are further possible links with other literatures that have not been explored, or which warrant further attention. On rehabilitation as therapy , for example, rehabilitation is in some respects similar to standard medical treatment, suggesting that literature from medical and psychiatric ethics—and especially on non-consensual psychiatric interventions—might be relevant to the discussion of rehabilitation.
On rehabilitation as moral improvement, rehabilitation is relevantly similar to, for instance, the moral education of children, which standardly also aims at moral improvement.
Again, this is a topic on which there is also some existing ethical discussion. Footnote 90 Drawing these links may help to clarify the types of interventions that can permissibly be used to rehabilitate offenders, and constraints that ought to be placed on their use. For example, a consent requirement in relation to rehabilitative interventions is suggested by rehabilitation as therapy , given that consent is standardly required for medical therapies, but not by some other conceptions, such as rehabilitation as anti - recidivism.
Identifying connections to other literatures may also strengthen the case for rehabilitation. On any of our conceptions of rehabilitation there are, as we have suggested, practices analogous to rehabilitation outside the criminal justice context.
These include, most obviously, health promotion interventions in public health, psychiatric treatments, and the moral education of children. This puts some pressure on opponents of rehabilitation to either i say something about why rehabilitation is inappropriate in criminal justice while these other interventions are appropriate outside the criminal justice context, or ii hold that these other interventions are inappropriate too.
In the case of the comparison to the moral education of children, opponents of rehabilitation views could perhaps quite easily identify morally relevant differences; many accept that we can treat children in ways in which it would not be permissible to treat adults, for example, because children are yet to develop some capacities or agency or will that warrants the kind of respect we afford adults who are full moral agents, or because children have a different profile of prudential values.
Footnote 91 But identifying morally relevant differences is more difficult when the comparison is to practices that do not involve children.
Identifying links to other literatures may also help us make headway towards greater clarity in discussions of rehabilitation. To some extent, existing unclarity can be attributed to the fact that different conceptions of rehabilitation invoke notions, such as mental disorder and moral improvement, that are themselves open to multiple interpretations and frequently used imprecisely. This source of unclarity remains even when different conceptions of rehabilitation are distinguished.
However, our taxonomy also suggests that we may be able to mitigate some of this unclarity by drawing on conceptual work done in other areas. For example, when defining mental deficit we might derive some benefit from work in psychiatry, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science; when clarifying the moral improvement conception, we might rely on work on moral education and moral bioenhancement.
Once we have achieved greater clarity in regard of what these notions mean or have better defined them, we can proceed to examine the extent to which they are measurable and how. The concept of rehabilitation is often deployed in academic discussions, policy documents and legal judgments without being precisely defined, and without its extension being intuitively clear. In this article, we have sought to bring a measure of clarity by offering a simple taxonomy of rehabilitation.
We have outlined five conceptions of rehabilitation that can be discerned in the literature, as well as a number of subvariants of these conceptions. The five conceptions are distinguished from one another chiefly by the ends that they ascribe to rehabilitation, but subvariants within these conceptions are in some cases distinguished also by the means used to achieve these ends.
This taxonomy is, however, just a beginning. There may be scope to broaden our taxonomy by adding conceptions of rehabilitation that we have missed. And there is certainly scope to deepen it by distinguishing variants of the conceptions that it posits.
One way to achieve such a deepening would be to more finely specify the aims of rehabilitative interventions, as we began to do with interventions that aim at moral improvement, for example, by distinguishing local and global forms of moral improvement.
Similarly, different variants of rehabilitation as anti - recidivism could differ in the breadth or range of the types of criminal and other behaviour that they seek to prevent. Another approach would be to specify hierarchies of aims. For example, we could distinguish between views according to which rehabilitation aims at moral improvement with the further aim of protecting the public and views according to which moral improvement is seen as the ultimate end. Finally, yet another approach would be to introduce further means-based distinctions.
Perhaps, for example, an interesting distinction could be drawn between effortful and effortless means. Footnote 92 The broadening and deepening of our taxonomy is, however, a task for further work. There are also difficult questions of application raised by our taxonomy: not all existing conceptions of rehabilitation can be neatly classified into the overlapping categories that it establishes. A recent report found that over 90 percent of the prisoners in the United Kingdom suffer from mental health problems [5].
Most major prison systems are feeling a significant problem in almost all the major crime offending countries because of overcrowding in prisons. Overcrowding can lead to inhumane living conditions and can, in turn, worsen the mental health of prisoners.
Overcrowding is one such problem that is pervasive throughout India. A lot of these reasons concern the problems faced by offenders. With the use of reformation and rehabilitation, many of these factors could be done away with for a lot of people. The problem of repeated offences and the mental health conditions of offenders can be dealt with significantly by imposing reformation and rehabilitation on selected prisoners. The experiment found a 15 percent drop in repeat offenses after two years compared to the participants who took part in the rehabilitation program compared with those who did not.
Reformation and rehabilitation programs will help them self-reflect, overcome substance abuse or mental health problems, etc. Overcrowding can also be dealt with by taking a significant chunk of low-level offenders who have committed crimes such as petty thefts and removing them from prison systems and adding them to rehabilitation programs instead.
It is a very close interpretation of the reformation and rehabilitation theory, which can be found in India. Open prisons [7] have minimum security and places more focus on the self-discipline of the offenders. In this system, the offenders are not bound by any locks, walls, or bars. According to the Rajasthan Prisoners Open Air Camp Rules, , the offenders can leave the prison any time after their roll call, and they must return before the second roll call. While they do not have many restrictions imposed upon the offenders, they require the offenders to earn money to support their families.
People eligible to enter open prisons are convicts who have had good behavior and conduct and have served a minimum of five years in a traditional closed prison. The most prosperous state in terms of their implementation of open prisons can be found in Rajasthan, where most open prisons in India can also be found. While it is still a theory that requires more understanding and more experiments for up till now, the view of reformation and rehabilitation stands its ground and makes a successful case for itself.
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