Despite decades of debate and countless efforts at reform, the future of America's correctional system looks almost as bleak as its past. In the 1980s, the nation's incarceration rate more than doubled. Today the U.S. prison population is soaring toward 800,000, and nearly 4 million citizens -- including one of every nine adult African-American males -- is under some form of correctional supervision (in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole). By some definitions, most prisons and jails are overcrowded; by any definition, many of them are filthy, violence-ridden, and lacking in programs that afford inmates a meaningful opportunity to work, achieve literacy, or free themselves from the shackles of substance abuse.
Nor has overcrowding behind bars prevented "overloading" on the streets. Roughly three-quarters of all persons under correctional supervision in this country are in the community under various forms of probation and parole. In many jurisdictions, the typical probation or parole agent now has over 300 cases to manage; in several big-city jurisdictions, the typical caseload exceeds 800. It is thus impossible for these public servants, however dedicated, to assist most offenders in finding jobs and rebuilding their lives. Indeed, it is simply impossible for them to monitor their clients' whereabouts and behavior.
In short, the American corrections system -- a loose confederation of hundreds of federal, state, and local agencies -- is protecting neither the public nor its purse. Corrections is the fastest growing item in most state budgets, and the federal prison system is expanding at a dizzying pace. This situation results from a combination of criminal justice policies, sentencing laws, and demographic trends that, do what we will, cannot be reversed any time soon. There is no escape from the political, administrative, and budgetary problems that now beset American corrections.
There are, however, some rays of hope. Perhaps the most interesting positive development concerns new evidence about the prospects of rehabilitating criminals and the value of rehabilitation programs as tools for managing prisons successfully. This new evidence should cause us to reassess the dismal view of rehabilitation that has prevailed in recent decades.
Nothing Works Revisited
In the 1960s and 1970s, major studies, some government-sponsored, challenged the efficacy of efforts to improve not just prisons but other public institutions in America as well. This research seemed to provide hard evidence to support public anxiety that new social programs and more spending on schools, job training, mental health care, and other services were not making any difference. The best known, and most controversial, of these studies was the 1966 report on education by James Coleman. Coleman found that such factors as expenditures per pupil and student-to-teacher ratios made virtually no difference in student performance on standardized tests, after controlling for the students' background characteristics.
The Coleman Report immediately underwent careful and critical scrutiny by legions of competent analysts. Over time, it gave rise to a light industry of research (some of the best of it by Coleman himself showing that, other things being equal, how principals manage teachers, and how teachers conduct classes, profoundly influence how well and how much pupils learn.
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Imagine, however, that there had been no progression from the no-can-do Coleman Report to the can-do research on "effective schools." Imagine that, and you will have a good idea of what happened following the "Coleman Report" on corrections, Robert Martinson's 'What Works?: Questions and Answers about Prison Reform."
Martinson's study appeared in the Spring 1974 edition of The Public Interest. Measured in terms of direct and lasting impact on a given area of public policy, 'What Works?" is arguably the single most influential article ever published in that influential journal. Before the article appeared, Martinson was an obscure researcher. But after the article's publication, and for the last five years of his life, Martinson became the country's best-known and most widely-quoted analyst of corrections policies. For the last decade and a half, Martinson's name has been synonymous with the idea that "nothing works" in the rehabilitation of convicted criminals. He has been damned by liberals, and celebrated by conservatives, for having provided policymakers and corrections officials with an intellectual justification for reducing or abolishing a wide range of institutional and community-based criminal rehabilitation programs.
Thinking citizens of whatever ideological persuasion who want government to respond to the contemporary crisis in corrections with safe, humane, and cost-effective policies have much to gain by coming to grips with the legacy of Martinson and the history of criminal rehabilitation programs. For the truth about both Martin's research and these programs is far more complex, and far more instructive and encouraging, than is generally understood.
Both behind bars and on the streets, convicted criminals in most jurisdictions can participate in many types of correctional programs, including remedial education classes, vocational training, substance-abuse counseling, mental health services, and work opportunities. There are at least three ways to think about these programs. First, we can think about them as instruments of offender rehabilitation; second, we can think about them as tools of institutional management; and, third, we can think about them as integral components of humane custody. On each of these three levels, there is some good, can-do government news.
Offender Rehabilitation
For most of this century, corrections analysts, activists, and practitioners have thought about programs mainly as instruments of offender rehabilitation, which lessen the probability that the offender will recidivate (commit new crimes), or increase the chances that the offender will assume a constructive role in society, or both. Traditionally, programs and rehabilitation have been linked conceptually. Even today, most corrections cognoscenti cannot utter three consecutive sentences about programs without mentioning recidivism or otherwise relating programs to offenders' behavior after supervision ends.
Generally speaking, since the end of World War 11 there have been three waves of thinking about the programs-rehabilitation nexus. Between 1945 and 1975 corrections experts viewed criminality as an illness caused by social or psychological conditions. Their prescribed cure was "treatment" through remedial education, psychotherapy, and other programs. Leading academic penologists joined with progressive practitioners in trumpeting a belief in the rehabilitative efficacy of these programs. This belief grew out of a fascinating and potent mixture of social idealism, practical experience, and preliminary research findings. I call this the era of "everything works."
This era came to an abrupt end in the mid-1970s. Between 1975 and 1985 many leading researchers, joined by practitioners who all along had been skeptical about the proliferation of programs, began to voice doubt or to deny flatly that programs were effective instruments of offender rehabilitation. The researcher who did the most to launch this critical line of inquiry and debate, placing the first and, apparently, the final nail in the rehabilitation coffin, was Robert Martinson.
Martinson undertook his research for the New York State Governor's Committee on Criminal Offenders. He reviewed all studies of the rehabilitative effects of programs written in English between 1945 and 1967, judging 231 of them to be sound methodologically. These studies examined the impact of programs on a number of variables, including recidivism and educational achievement. In his Public Interest article, Martinson concluded: "With few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported thus far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism." Reaction to Martinson's article was fast and furious. Ms essay, interpreted far and wide to demonstrate that "nothing works" in the rehabilitation of criminals, became an instant rallying point for the assorted opponents of "liberal" penal administration, from old-style wardens who equated programs with "coddling," to conservative intellectuals eager to put rehabilitation in the trophy case of failed social engineering. Meanwhile, critics charged Martinson with everything from scholarly malfeasance to sheer stupidity. These critics had their wings clipped in 1979 when a panel of the National Academy of Sciences retraced Martinson's steps and concluded that his analysis was essentially correct.
Exactly what was Martinson's analysis, and precisely what did it show? Martinson himself never actually wrote or insisted that "nothing works." On the contrary in the same year that the academy endorsed his work, Martinson published a little-noticed article in the Hofstra Law Review that heaped further qualifications on his already heavily qualified conclusion that programs have "no appreciable effect" on recidivism.
Read correctly, neither Martinson's studies, nor the academy's, nor any of the other credible analyses of the day suggested that there was absolutely no relationship, or absolutely no inverse relationship, between offender participation in programs and recidivism. These studies found only that the statistical evidence was inconclusive, based on the best research then available. The evidence did not enable one to know whether the general relationship between program participation and recidivism was positive, negative, or nonexistent. The data did not admit of confident generalizations one way or the other. Interpreted properly, the studies were cold comfort all around.
But Martinson's study and its echoes were not interpreted properly, either by their fans or by their foes. Thus, in the decade following the publication of Martinson's essay in The Public Interest, those who opposed programs on ideological grounds wrapped themselves in the cloak of scientific respectability and pronounced rehabilitation as a four-letter word from a thoroughly discredited era of "liberal" penal reform. Meanwhile, those who favored programs on ideological grounds found themselves utterly on the defensive, with both the policy rhetoric ("nothing works") and the misinterpreted policy science (Martinson and the academy) stacked high against them.
Something Works
Between 1985 and 1990, however, the counter-offensive against the "nothing works" school gathered momentum by gathering a host of solid empirical findings. Most of the early attacks on "nothing works," however, were merely polemical. Only since 1985 has a critical mass of empirical studies accumulated to challenge the "nothing works" school. In fact, recent research that builds on Martinson's famous (or infamous) study suggests that offenders who participate in certain types of programs are less likely to commit new crimes against persons and property than otherwise comparable offenders who have not participated in them. There is also some evidence that certain types of programs succeed in reducing substance abuse among offenders and thus in breaking the drugs-and-crime nexus.
Many researchers have contributed to what has variously been labeled the "revivification of rehabilitation" or "reaffirming rehabilitation" literature. One of the most interesting and persuasive of these researchers is Paul Gendreau. In a series of articles, Gendreau has reported on the results of original research by himself and others that should lead any open-minded observer to conclude that "something works" in the rehabilitation of convicted criminals.
Just as Martinson never actually argued that "nothing works," so Gendreau and his colleagues do not insist that correctional rehabilitation is any sort of a panacea. Rather, he and his co-researchers contend that a "growing body of data suggests not only that many interventions are successful but also that it is becoming increasingly possible to isolate the characteristics of effective treatment."
They are right. By my count, there are now hundreds of empirical studies indicating that offenders who participate in certain types of programs are less likely to commit new crimes than otherwise comparable offenders who do not participate in them; and, the most solidly scientific of these studies show the greatest bang for the rehabilitation buck.
As Gendreau and others have suggested, whether offered behind bars or on the streets, rehabilitation programs that work have many organizational and strategic elements in common. In general, the effective programs provide the offender with non-criminal role models that are "within reach" (working men who are making it, rather than sports celebrities); enhance the offender's basic problem-solving skills; utilize whatever human and financial resources exist within the offender's home community; build interpersonal relationships that strengthen empathetic impulses; teach respect for legitimate authority; and offer relevant post-program support services.
Let me offer just a few examples. In 1983 New Jersey began an Intensive Supervision Program (ISP), an experimental parole program. The major aim of the program was not to rehabilitate offenders but to reduce prison crowding. And while the program was certainly not designed to "coddle" criminals, neither was it designed to abandon or abuse them. As one New Jersey official aptly described it, "ISP was built around the old corrections adage 'firm but fair.' It was meant to be a no-excuses program but with a human face. That's pretty much how it's been run." Program participants were expected to comply with curfew, drug abstention, employment, and other rules governing their whereabouts and behavior. Those who violated the terms of the program (as about 24 percent did) were immediately returned to prison.
As of January 1990, some 661 offenders had completed the program. New Jersey's Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) has tracked the arrest and conviction records of program graduates. AOC found that fewer than one in five had been arrested, and only 2.7 percent had been convicted of a felony offense. Recidivism rates for otherwise comparable populations of parolees not under intensive supervision have run closer to 30 percent. Moreover, it has cost about $6,700 per offender per year to administer the New Jersey ISP -- a far cry from the estimated $25,000 per offender per year it takes to administer the state's prisons. Evaluations of intensive supervision programs in other jurisdictions have yielded similarly positive results.
Intensive supervision programs are often confused with "boot camp" (or "shock incarceration") programs. Congress is now encouraging states and localities to develop boot camp facilities -- secure penal institutions that subject young, short-term felons to a daily regimen of paramilitary discipline and tight custodial controls combined (at least in theory) with remedial education, substance-abuse counseling, and other "life-skills" programs.
As of this writing, there are no systematic studies evaluating either the rehabilitative efficacy or cost-effectiveness of boot camps. The anecdotal evidence is mixed. Boot camps, however, are rapidly becoming the panacea of choice among politicians eager to solve the corrections crisis, or at least to appear to be solving it. But there are several reasons to pause before jumping on the boot camp bandwagon.
First, boot camps institutionalize low-level felons who could be treated better, and more cheaply, in the community via intensive supervision. Second, the natural center of administrative gravity in corrections is custodial. I myself have argued strongly in favor of paramilitary operations, but only in maximum-security prisons where such discipline is needed. It has taken the corrections profession two generations to develop norms and procedures that strike a workable balance between custodial imperatives and treatment opportunities in sub-maximum-security settings. Administratively, boot camps are too much like an invitation to turn back the clock.
Third, we have been down this road several times before, and the results have never been good. In correctional history each time attention has focused on the mass of young offenders who are neither harmless first-timers nor chronic predatory criminals, Americans have reinvented the turn-of-the-century reformatory an institution that, to say the least, succeeded neither in disciplining young criminals nor in redirecting their lives. In short, intensive supervision programs are a good bet, boot camps a dubious one.
But perhaps the single greatest cause for optimism is the success of certain types of prison-based programs for drug-abusing offenders. Marcia R. Chaiken has analyzed four such programs that treated serious offenders. She found that recidivism rates after participation were as low as 16 percent, well below the average for untreated offenders. 8 Chaiken identified several features that the successful programs shared, including staff who demonstrated obvious concern for the offenders' welfare, and offenders who developed a clear understanding of the program's rules and the penalties for breaking them.
Along these same lines, M. Douglas Anglin recently surveyed the literature on corrections-based programs for drug-abusing offenders, and identified the organizational and strategic elements shared by the successful programs. As he summarized the results of a previous analysis of some 80 studies, "appropriate drug abuse treatment in prisons produced a significantly lower rate of recidivism than did no treatment or inappropriate treatment. Treatment was found to be effective in both adults and juveniles, in studies before and after 1980 in randomized and nonrandomized designs, and in diversionary community, and residential programs." Among other features, to increase the likelihood of success, Anglin concluded, prison-based drug treatment programs should be offered to inmates nine months to a year prior to their eligibility for parole, provide aftercare, and attract and retain high-quality staff.
But as exciting and encouraging as such findings are, the idea that "something works" in the rehabilitation of criminals must not be oversold. At least three major cautions are in order.
First, some, though by no means most or all, of the studies in question (including Gendreau's) are based on rather elaborate statistical gymnastics that can be legitimately interpreted in ways that give almost as much aid and comfort to "nothing works" enthusiasts as they do to proponents of rehabilitation. Second, most of the empirically irrefutable good news about rehabilitation programs concerns relatively low-level offenders being supervised in the community. There is virtually no body of reliable evidence that violent and chronic offenders -- what corrections officials term "heavies" -- can be rehabilitated. And, third, one universal feature of successful programs is extraordinarily dedicated and competent program administration, and such administration is rare. To the extent that the success of rehabilitation efforts depends on the unique and nontransferable talents of those who administer them, it is extremely difficult to generalize about -- let alone to design, institutionalize, sustain, and reproduce -- programs that work.
Nevertheless, these caveats not withstanding, we are a long way from the notion that government can do little or nothing either to reduce the criminality, or to enhance the life prospects, of citizens under correctional supervision. The evidence that some offender rehabilitation programs are extremely effective is neither a figment of the liberal imagination nor a specter that should haunt thinking conservatives.
Institutional Management
The good news about programs does not end there. Whatever their value as rehabilitation tools, it is increasingly clear that programs are indispensable to good prison and jail management. While there is some academic research to support this view, the most persuasive evidence for it comes from the beliefs and experiences of prison and jail managers themselves.
In the mid-1970s, legislatures in a number of jurisdictions mandated a major reduction in authority and funding for correctional programs behind bars. In most cases, the legislatures were echoing a "get tough" shift in public attitudes; and, in a few cases, the lawmakers were also reacting to the sting of lobbying efforts by newly-formed victims' rights organizations.
At the same time, the widely publicized "nothing works" findings made it difficult for defenders of the programs to characterize program-gutting initiatives as products of "lock 'em up and throw away the key" hysteria. In California, for example, the "rehabilitative ideal" rose in the 1940s and took shape in dozens of new programs. But in the late 1970s the legislature changed the prisons' mandate to "punishment" plain and simple; Martinson was on the lips of many who testified in favor of ending or dramatically curtailing prison-based programs.
But what did corrections administrators in California and most other jurisdictions actually do in response to these shifts in public opinion, law, and academic wisdom? The revealing truth is that they did little or nothing. Very few agencies actually cut back on programs at all; some even added new programs and expanded existing ones.
Through an examination of departmental annual reports and interviews with present and former corrections officials around the country, I have searched for evidence of actual program retrenchment at the state level and within the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) during the period 1975-1985. I have found little or none. What I have found, however, is evidence that corrections officials, using techniques ranging in bureaucratic sophistication from obvious foot-dragging and outright defiance to exploitation of the often vague language of the new statutes and the "reinvention" of old programs under new names, simply continued to staff and operate institutional programs. Just why they did so was captured nicely in the words of a veteran prison administrator who, as he recalled, "fought this stupid battle in two states":
I was around in the days when all the convicts did was sit on their asses, in their cells or on the tiers ... That got you two things. Either you [staff] went nuts with boredom and felt like you were working in a human warehouse. Or the [inmates] had all the time in the world to sit and think up ways to make trouble ... When programs started in the 50s then [got] bigger in the 60s, it seemed like a fad that would pass, and it was a real pain moving the [inmates] from the cellblock, to the ed center, to the shrink's cave [psychiatrist's office], back to the ed center, over to shop [prison industry] ... But after a while, I liked, everybody liked it. It kept the convicts busy. It helped every third one grow up and act more mature. And it was interesting for staff. It nixed the boredom ... With the programs, you could become a white-collar by moving out of security and into counseling or what have you... Now, I don't see how the hell you could run a joint without programs. Without them, staff would get fed up, and the convicts would probably be more trouble to themselves and everybody else ... There was no way we were going to [mess] up everything just because some [stupid] legislator or [stupider] professor decided that rehabilitation was dead. "Rehabilitation" isn't in the vocabulary, never was. [Programs] are like custody, like food service ... They are part of what it takes to run a good joint, period.
There is no body of empirical research to prove or refute what most prison and jail administrators believe about the efficacy of programs as institutional management tools. But most of the existing evidence, such as it is, tends to support the practitioners' view that, other things being equal, the more programmatic an institution, the safer and less costly it is to operate. Let me, therefore, briefly summarize what I take to be the practitioners' three main propositions about programs and the case for each of them.
Programs are valuable as incentives for good inmate behavior. It is certainly true that few inmates prefer sitting in a cramped cell to working in an industrial plant, doing outdoor landscaping, attending classes, receiving vocational instruction, and so on. Except in the case of legally mandated health services and the like, program participation is a privilege that administrators can extend or withhold in accordance with behavioral criteria that inmates can learn through formal orientations, official handbooks, the inmate grapevine, and informal communication with staff. Where parole can still be had on such terms, inmates have an incentive to participate in relevant programs. But to participate in programs, they must first refrain from illicit and predatory behaviors that may render them ineligible.
In pondering this proposition, the Federal Bureau of Prisons' experience with the Federal Correction Institution at Butner in North Carolina may be instructive. Butner was opened in 1976 as an "experimental" institution. Its population consisted of some of the most hard-to-handle inmates in the federal system. At Butner, however, these inmates were intentionally handled with a minimal reliance on coercive measures, and in the context of institutional rules that made it possible for inmates to move about and interact rather freely.
But an equally crucial feature of Butner's management program was its rich menu of "self-help programs." These programs were offered to inmates but not required of them. An independent research team hired by the BOP studied the effects of this regime on the recidivism of Butner inmates. The team's studies were based on an experimental research design that was flawed in its execution, though by no means fatally so. The studies found that participation in Butner's programs had no discernible effect on inmates' post-release criminal activity or on their employment status. At the same time, however, the studies found that the programs had a major and positive effect on the quality of life inside Butner. A 1987 evaluation report concluded: "When inmates were allowed to volunteer for programs, they not only participated in more programs, but they also completed more programs. There were fewer disciplinary problems and fewer assaults."
Programs facilitate good inmate-staff, and intra-staff, relations and communications. The administration of programs routinizes personal interaction among and between inmates and staff. Running programs successfully-indeed, running them at all-requires vertical and horizontal cooperation among otherwise disparate elements of the staff (uniformed security staff and counselors, department brass, and line workers). Programs get inmates and staff talking to each other and interacting on a nonconfrontational basis. While no guarantee of peace behind bars, a full complement of programs improves the likelihood that the institution will achieve this goal.
When I first heard this proposition expressed by practitioners, including many a grizzled old guard, I was quite surprised. After all, conventional prison sociology taught (and by and large still teaches) that there is an irreducible and almost wholly unproductive tension between "treatment" and "custody." This disheartening idea grew out of studies based largely on the experiences of the late 1940s, the 1950s, and the early 1960s. These studies were tales of cataclysmic violence and administrative turmoil wrought when uniformed security staff, long the sole sovereigns of the cellblocks, were suddenly forced into working with, and around, invading hordes of teachers, psychologists, nurses, and other professionals.
But the leading analysts of the day were too quick to infer that, administratively, the big house was, and would remain, a house divided. Neither they nor their intellectual successors were sufficiently in tune to the possibility of administrative evolution and adaptation among and between so-called treatment and custody staff. In effect, they were blind to the possibility that, over time, programs could actually make all staff more responsive to inmates' needs, foster respect and cooperation among and between inmates and staff, and enhance staff morale, esprit de corps, and sense of professional mission, all of which might eventually translate into less staff turnover or "burn out," less use of disability leave, less staff abuse of inmates, less litigation, and a reduction of other factors that raise the human and financial toll of administering prisons and jails.
Most corrections administrators now believe that this is precisely what programs have done. There is little systematic evidence of any kind that either validates or voids this bit of their wisdom on the subject, at least not evidence of the sort that would pass muster with any social scientist. But if one is willing to admit to the bar as evidence the testimony of hundreds of persons who have spent most of their adult lives running prisons and jails with and without programs, and if one is willing to cast a broad net over the "natural experiments" with programs they have lived through and conducted, then the proposition that programs are a boon to institutional management seems a much better bet than its opposite number.
Programs facilitate staff recruitment, training, and development, and are a force for the professionalization of corrections. There are some people who might enjoy spending most of their adult years doing nothing but counting, frisking, shaking down cells, and forcibly moving inmates. Every corrections institution has, and probably needs, a core of workers for whom "lock psychosis" is a preferred mental state, and who like nothing better than the camaraderie that comes with such nitty-gritty line-level work. But most people, including the kinds of people needed to fill the middle and upper rungs of a large, complex public bureaucracy, enjoy exercising a wider range of mental and other skills, and will want readily identifiable on-the-job outlets for personal and career growth over time. For these people, what institutional corrections has to offer is programs, or, more precisely, the chance to have professional, or quasi-professional, employment opportunities within correctional settings.
As was true for the two preceding propositions about the utility of programs as management tools, I know of no systematic body of evidence to document or refute this view. But there is, again, the broad and deep consensus among practitioners, and tons of anecdotal material to support it.
For example, for years the Federal Bureau of Prisons was able to attract and hold on to dedicated workers all around the country. Clearly, this success stemmed in part from the higher pay offered by the BOP compared to the rates offered by its state and local counterparts. But in addition, because of its programmatic emphasis, the BOP gave its typical employee the chance for a more challenging and diversified career. In the 1980s the BOP lost its salary edge in most places. Entry-level corrections workers in many states could earn almost twice the pay of an entry-level BOP worker, and typical upper-level managers in these states took home over $15,000 a year more than their BOP cousins. Nonetheless, the federal agency continued to have a good deal of success in personnel recruitment and retention at all levels.
Scores of BOP workers maintained that the federal system was a more interesting place to work, though they were aware of their relative financial deprivation. One worker who had left a higher-paying job in a state corrections department for a post with the BOP stated: 'With the programs, you get a sense of professionalism and being a professional. You have to know custody, and custody is the most important thing. But it's not the only thing. Programs are what makes corrections."
Humane Custody
But even among prison and jail administrators who take an institutional management perspective on programs, there is no little disagreement over whether all, some, or no inmates really "deserve" access to educational, work, substance abuse, and other services. Within the practitioner community as within the ranks of corrections analysts, activists, and the public at large, there are some who harbor extreme views on the moral question of whether programs are a defining feature of humane custody.
One extreme position is that correctional institutions without programs are a moral outrage. In this view, a full complement of programs ought to be provided whether or not it can be shown that they facilitate institutional management, have a positive effect on institutional conditions, pay for themselves over time, or lower recidivism.
The other extreme position is that correctional institutions with programs are a moral outrage. In this view, giving criminals educational, employment, and other opportunities that many average, law-abiding citizens cannot obtain, and doing so at taxpayer expense, is unconscionable. Programs ought not to be provided even if they can be shown to improve management, enhance conditions, lower costs, or reduce recidivism.
But most corrections practitioners, activists, and analysts take a position between these two extremes; so do most Americans generally. 11 In the survey reported here, rehabilitation was one of six discrete "purposes of punishment" that over 58 percent of all respondents deemed "very important." In fact, while 79.2 percent rated deterrence as "very important," 71.5 percent rated rehabilitation as "very important." Only 25 percent deemed sheer retribution 'very important" as a purpose of punishment. These results are echoed in scores of other credible surveys conducted between 1975 and 1989. Most of us are neither so forgiving that we would rush to shower convicted criminals with such opportunities, nor so vengeful that we would categorically deprive them of such opportunities in sheer spite.
With respect to the moral propriety of programs, I myself move from a consequentialist perspective that weighs the effects of programs on recidivism rates, institutional management, and conditions, and our pocketbooks as taxpayers. From this perspective, programs appear as key components of humane custody, and humane custody pays all around.
Ideology and Analysis
Pragmatic proponents of good government should welcome word of these silver linings in the clouds over American corrections. But there is nothing here for strict libertarians who believe that government was conceived in sin and favor privatization as a cure-all for the ills of public administration. Likewise, there is little here for neoconservatives who revel in the fact that governmental action on complex societal problems often produces perverse and unintended consequences. And there is nothing here to tickle the fancies of liberals who view well-intentioned governmental initiatives as self-justifying and always more successful than not.
Fortunately, however, such stereotypical ideologues are few. Most Americans, including most serious students of American public policy, are normally more than willing to allow their ideological convictions to be mitigated by reasoned argument and dispassionate analysis. In the field of corrections, the public mood and the intellectual fashion may alternate between "get tough" and "go easy" approaches. But most of us are capable of heeding the wisdom of veteran corrections professionals, and understanding that the last best hopes for our county's correctional future can be found in the most moderate moments of its correctional past.
