One of the most notable aspects of the justice system’s contemporary functioning is the fact that its representatives claim to be willing to embrace the so-called “rehabilitative” correctional philosophy, when the penal focus is shifted from punishing the convicted criminal, as something that has the value of a thing-in-itself, to making it more likely for him or her to be able to integrate into the society once released (Tripodi 2014).
Among the most convincing indications that the concerned correctional reform is well underway is commonly mentioned the establishment and the growing popularity of a number of the conceptually innovative penitentiary facilities in the US and the UK, such as prison farms, restitution centres, reformatories, study release centres, etc. At the same time, however, there is now enough evidence that the functioning of these correctional institutions is very ineffective, to say the least.
In this regard, one will only need to mention the fact that the rate of criminal recidivism in both countries reaches a staggering 70% (Fazel & Wolf 2015). This essay will explore the issue at length and expose the objective preconditions for the implementation of the rehabilitative correctional paradigm in the West to continue sustaining setbacks.
Throughout the course of history, the concept of corporal punishment never ceased undergoing a qualitative transformation to be up to date, in the discursive sense of this word. For example, before the Industrial Revolution, the punishing of a convicted criminal often involved inflicting physical pain on the person or disposing of him/her altogether. Nevertheless, after the establishment of the secular nation-states in the early 19th century, more and more policy-makers in the West were beginning to realise that criminals too, in fact, represent a certain “human capital” (Bierie & Mann 2017).
As a result, during the 19th century, the concept of penal punishment was transformed from being concerned with punishing the “body” to serve the purpose of punishing the “mind”. This development coincided with the legal legitimisation of the concept of penal imprisonment: after having served time in jail; convicts are expected to be able to reintegrate socially (Hessick & Berman 2016). Nevertheless, contrary to how many people view it, the considerations of conventional morality played only a minor role in bringing about both developments. Rather, the penal progress in question was made possible by the fact that in the society that undergoes industrialisation, human resources are in particularly high demand.
Nevertheless, the beginning of the post-industrial era (in the early 1960s), triggered by the societal shift from industrial manufacturing to producing technologies, resulted in causing social scientists to reassess the discursive implications of the term “human capital”. This could not be otherwise, because in the post-industrial society one’s value as an individual cannot be discussed outside of the person’s educational attainment, as well as his or her varying ability to indulge in the synthesised (creative) type of thinking (Cohen & Yang 2019).
Therefore, there are now no socially predetermined conditions for policy-makers to sincerely believe that the imprisonment of convicted criminals may serve any rehabilitative purposes, whatsoever. The reason for this is apparent: the suppression of criminal leanings in a convict (the ultimate purpose of incarceration), will not result in increasing his or her “human capital” value. In post-industrial society, one’s body has no value apart from the fact that it contains valuable organ transplants. It is specifically the person’s cranial capacity (mind) that nowadays defines his or her chances of social advancement (Gritsenko & Orlov 2017).
During the industrial era, it was assumed that it is namely the convict’s willingness to adhere to the socially imposed rules and regulations that qualifies him for rehabilitation more than anything. Nowadays, however, it becomes ever clearer to everybody that the time served in jail hardly results in encouraging an inmate to work on expanding its intellectual horizons. Quite to the contrary. The longer a convicted criminal remains in jail, the more he or she becomes affiliated with the virtues of a pre-industrial living: ethnic solidarity, ritualistic religiosity, racial intolerance, etc.
The worst thing of all, however, is that such a person becomes convinced that the application of direct physical violence is the only effective way to address life’s challenges (May et al. 2014). The reason for this is that while imprisoned, people naturally come in extremely close touch with their atavistic nature as “hairless primates”. Just as it is being the case within the ape pack, most imprisoned convicts preoccupy themselves with trying to impose dominance over each other on a full-time basis.
For example, the qualitative aspects of one’s long-term incarceration in just about any American prison cannot be discussed outside of what accounts for the influence of prison gangs on defining the actual realities of imprisonment. In this regard, we can mention the fact that it is specifically the convicted members of different ethnic gangs that contribute the most to the formation of a social climate in every particular jail. In fact, it now became a common practice among the personnel to cooperate with the convicted gang leaders as the most effective instrument of keeping the rest of inmates under control (Butler, Slade & Camila 2018).
Because of this, the current correctional situation in the West (especially in the US and the UK), marked by the skyrocketing rate of incarceration, may seem to be deprived of any rationale, whatsoever. After all, it has been proven by biologists a long time ago that punishing one’s “mind” will never change the way in which the concerned person perceives the surrounding social reality and its challenges.
The reason for this is that, as the recent breakthroughs in the field of neurobiology indicate, the actual individuality of a person is defined by the morphological specifics of his or her brain’s structuring. What this means is that the very idea that it is possible to “re-educate” criminals is fallacious. Because they are nothing but the representatives of just another species of primates, people cannot help being preoccupied with sexual mating (sex), securing access to nutrients (food), and trying to attain social prominence (domination). Therefore, it will prove impossible to “re-educate” a convicted thief so that he never considers stealing again, for example.
After all, by stealing a particular resource a person is able to preserve much precious metabolic energy that he or she would have been required to waste on acquiring the same resource in a socially appropriate manner. Once assessed from the biological perspective, the criminal act of stealing makes a perfectly good sense (for as long as the perpetrator is able to get away with it, of course). In the eyes of evolution, driven by blind mutations and the equally blind principle of natural selection, it is being of no relevance, whatsoever, whether the person is moral/law-obeying or immoral/criminally-minded.
All that matters is whether he or she can succeed in spreading its genome or not (Ozkan 2017). Unfortunately, the proponents of the rehabilitative approach to serving justice refuse to acknowledge this simple fact, because of their naïve belief that Homo Sapiens is the final product of evolution.
Thus, the current popularity of “rehabilitative justice” in the West is best explained with respect to the fact that the paradigm’s practical implementation provides justification for the continual expansion of bureaucratic apparatus within the penitentiary system (Giroux 2017). The actual well-being of inmates has never been of any importance to the paradigm’s advocates, despite all the politically correct and well-meaning rhetoric on the part of the former.
Nevertheless, the true purpose of the ongoing popularisation of the penal concept in question is to revitalise the economy by mean of providing large manufacturing companies with access to dirt-cheap labour in their home countries. As De Giorgi (2017) aptly suggested, “The reproduction of a large army of disenfranchised poor people rendered politically powerless to resist their exploitation… is not an unintended consequence or a collateral effect of the prison, but rather one of its constitutive features and historical raisons d’être” (p. 113).
For as long as the society remains capitalist and continues to profess the ideology of extreme individualism (Neoliberalism), it is not in the position to expect that it can achieve much progress in the way of combating crime. The implementation of even the most progressive penal reforms, in this regard, is bound to sustain an eventual fiasco.
The apparent failure of rehabilitative penology in the UK and the US provides us with the clue as to why it is going to be the case. After all, within the model’s discursive framework, the notion of “rehabilitation” stands for the assumption that after having served their sentences, former convicts will be willing to work as common labourers while paid a minimum wage salary. However, it is not only that such an assumption is conceptually erroneous, but also deliberately misleading.
That is, its promoters strive to prevent people from being able to distinguish rehabilitation from exploitation, which in turn is supposed to strengthen the bourgeoisie’s hegemonic grip onto the society. As the same author stated in his other article, “The mainstream penal discourse… is fundamentally incompatible with any acknowledgment of the structural ties between the rise of the penal state and the dramatic increase in social inequalities in the collective West” (De Giorgi 2016, p. 9).
Does this mean that the social reintegration of former criminals is impossible by definition? The answer to this question is negative. The actual rationale behind this answer is reflective of the fact that even though people’s behaviour is indeed instinctual to a considerable extent, the representatives of the Homo Sapiens species are social beings. As practice indicates, one’s prolonged existence in a socially withdrawn mode inevitably results in setting the individual on the path of self-destruction.
What this means is that there must be a powerful incentive for the locked up convicts to be naturally drawn to the prospect of becoming a part of the society again. The reason why many of these individuals end up being charged with committing another criminal offence within a short time after their release from jail is that the surrounding social reality is not quite social, in the traditional sense of the word.
Because of the continual dominance of the Neoliberal ideology in the West, citizens are being encouraged to assume that the main purpose of one’s life is to consume goods and services on a continual basis, as something that has a value of its own: the activity that supposedly makes the concerned individual truly happy and “free” (Falkoff 2015). However, by adopting a consumerist lifestyle, people cannot help growing ever more atomised, in the societal sense of this word, and therefore more likely to consider perpetrating a crime as the most effortless (although risky) instrument of social advancement (Plattner 2017).
This provides us with a partial clue as to the apparent inefficiency of rehabilitative penology in the West: the paradigm’s conceptual premises do not take into consideration the highly systemic nature of how the society comes into being in the first place. As a result, all the talks about making it easier for the released convicts to succeed in trying to reintegrate socially are being increasingly deprived of any practical sense, especially given the fact that the rehabilitative model’s postulates are now being commonly perceived as merely declarative (Grasso 2017). In the US and the UK, once criminal, always criminal: the is the direct consequence of the ongoing stigmatisation of crime along the racial and class lines.
As one can infer from what was said earlier, for the rehabilitative justice-model to prove workable, the society’s developmental philosophy must be adjusted to serve purpose of human advancement, as opposed to encouraging people to act on behalf of their consumerist instincts. How this could be achieved in practice represents a separate topic for the discussion.
At this point, it can be confirmed that the line of analytical reasoning, deployed throughout the paper, is fully consistent with its initial thesis. Apparently, there is indeed very little point in discussing the practical viability of different approaches to administering criminal punishments outside of what accounts for the socio-political and economic climate within the society. This exposes the erroneousness of the constructivist outlook on crime and presupposes that the time has come for criminologists to consider conceptualising the former as a thoroughly positivist category. Nevertheless, it is very unlikely for such a development to take place any time soon, as it will put in question the whole system of political governing in both countries. The present paper is meant to contribute to the cause.
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