Treatment and Rehabilitation of Offenders - Essay Example

Running Head: PRISON; TREATMENT AND REHABILITATION OF OFFENDERS To What Extent Is Prison A Suitable Place For The Treatment And Rehabilitation Of Offenders [Writer's Name] [Name of Institution] To What Extent Is Prison A Suitable Place For The Treatment And Rehabilitation Of Offenders It is not clear that prisons, as institutions, have the competence to provide high quality rehabilitation services. Prisons are not at present designed to be schools or institutions; still less are they set up as places where trusted advisors can dispense either counseling or good counsel, or environments where family ties and family support can be nurtured. And the history of school, work, counseling, and family programs in prisons does not inspire confidence: while programs of these sorts are not uncommon in prisons, they are difficult to evaluate, often operated haphazardly, and plagued by skepticism about whether 'rehabilitation' actually 'works.' The cynicism about rehabilitation springs from three sets of concerns, all reasonable, up till now all paralyzing if accepted without thought. The first reason for skepticism is the fear that people who have demonstrated their contempt for society's laws may continue to flout them, even after they are better prepared to survive as law-abiding citizens. Preparation cannot change the mind of someone committed to crime. (Mair, 2004) However one might also squabble that without the preparation-educational, emotional, and psychological-to survive without crime, even someone committed to reform will have a hard time changing his life. Preparation is neither a panacea nor a guarantee, but it makes reform possible. A second reason for skepticism is the adversarial environment of the prison. Prisoners are confined involuntarily, and prison staff is the ones keeping them there. The resulting bitterness, resentment, wariness, and contempt would seem to preclude the trust and mutual respect necessary for effective teaching, supervising, or counseling. Yet those who have studied prisons, or other social organizations, know that it is not impossible for opponents to work together for some mutual advantage, even if their mutual suspicion never quite disappears. If programs meant to prepare prisoners for release are beneficial to both staff and prisoners, one might see cooperation begin to develop. An implementation problem, of the kind that political scientists and public policy scholars have studied extensively in the last twenty-five years. Reframing the failures of rehabilitation as implementation failures leads us to see that staff and prisoners base their support for and participation in programs on criteria different from what most policymakers or advocates might believe. Staff and prisoners work with and participate in programs not because of their long-term rehabilitative benefits, but because programs can satisfy their immediate, prison-centered needs. Their interest is in programs that keep prisoners busy and interested, with incentives that are valuable, given the context of a particular prison. They also look for programs that are congruent with the values that staff uses to govern their interaction with prisoners and their understanding of their jobs. Programs are part of a particular style of prison management: one that encourages accommodation between staff and prisoners, as opposed to group loyalty. In prisons where existing patterns of staff interaction embrace this kind of interaction, programs will be welcomed. But in prisons that do not, staff will reject programs or attempt to subvert them. (McGuire, 2002) The prison environment structures the extent to which staff understands policy and both staff and prisoners decide to cooperate with it. Implementing programs successfully, therefore, requires an understanding of how the organizational context of each individual prison will interact with the written policies and provisions that govern rehabilitation programs. This understanding recasts the debate about whether prisoners must first be 'amenable' to rehabilitation before programs can work. Stated in this way, the claim is true but somewhat trivial: the real task is to create prison environments that encourage prisoners to rehabilitate themselves, and that encourage staff to help the prisoners along. The home secretary is the central authority for the prevention of crime and treatment of offenders in England and Wales. In Scotland, the secretary of state for Scotland holds authority over administration of prisons and related activities. The respective secretaries are members of Parliament and are answerable for their activities before that body. The authority within the Home Office directly responsible for administration, staffing, and building of prisons, borstals, detention centers, and remand centers is the Prison Department. The director general of the Prison Department is a deputy under secretary of state. In addition to his duties of overall supervision of the Prison Department, he is responsible for the parole scheme. His headquarters frames pertinent legislation, statutory rules, standing orders, and instructions and issues policy statements and guidance. The Prison Department is divided into four regions. Beneath the regional offices are the various individual confinement facilities, each playing more or less a specific role in the overall treatment of offenders Those institutions are designated as prisons, remand centers, detention centers, and borstals. Prisons consist of local prisons and training prisons. The twenty-four local prisons for men are the ''maids-of-all-work' of the prison system' primarily housing persons twenty-one years of age and older whether on remand, convicted, or sentenced. They are closed prisons in which the vast majority of prisoners sleep in cells or cubicles rather than dormitories or huts. The local prisons housed an average population of 16,680 males during 1978. (Roberts, 2004) Training prisons house sentenced prisoners who have been allocated there under the classification scheme. They may be closed or open. The vast majority of prisoners in closed training prisons (8:3 ratio) spend their time in cells or cubicles as opposed to huts or dormitories, whereas the reverse (1:4 ratio) is true in open training prisons. During 1978, an average population of 11,120 males spent time in the thirty-six closed training prisons while only 3,107 were housed in the nine open training prisons. (Roberts, 2004) Clearly, the great bulk of adult male prisoners in England have been housed in cells in closed prisons. Remand centers hold persons fourteen or over but under twenty-one years of age who have been remanded or committed in custody for trial or sentence. Detention centers house youths fourteen or older but less than twenty-one years of age. Junior detention centers house prisoners less than seventeen years of age and senior detention centers hold the older youths. Prisoners in detention centers must have been sentenced to at least three but not more than six months' confinement. The regimes in the senior detention centers are rigorous but perhaps not the 'short, sharp shock' that has been associated with such confinement. Borstals house youths seventeen and over but under twenty-one years of age for training and instruction as will conduce to their reformation and the prevention of crime. Borstal boys must serve a sort of indeterminate sentence of not less than six months nor more than two years. As prison is now the major system for punishing offenders, there are an increasing number of people being imprisoned. This is creating a problem of chronic overcrowding. In order to try and slightly alleviate this problem there are currently a range of alternative institutions. These can be grouped under two main types. The first is local prisons and remand centres, whose primary task is to receive and deliver prisoners to the courts. The second is Young Offenders Institutions and adult training prisons. All prisoners within these groups are classified either A, B, C or D according to a scheme devised in 1966 by Lord Mountbatten (Carrabine et al., 2004). Those who are in category A are seen as being highly dangerous, whereas those in category D are seen as not dangerous. Mountbatten called for the concentration of all category A prisoners into one single-purpose, maximum-security fortress. This was quickly rejected on the basis of safety and security. Instead, a policy of dispersal was adopted where maximum-security prisoners were spread among a few high-security prisons. This strategy had the negative effect of intensifying internal control (Carrabine et al., 2004). The presence of a small number of maximum-security prisoners affected the vast majority of other prisoners as they were subjected too much more custodial regimes. It is not fair on more minimum-security prisoners to be treated in the same manner as maximum-security prisoners. The punishment should relate only to the crime committed and so, in theory, category D offenders should not be punished in the same way as category A. Perhaps these category D offenders would benefit from being punished in an alternative way to imprisonment. This could be beneficial in helping to keep prison numbers down. The increasing number of offenders being imprisoned is becoming cause for concern. In a statement made by Michael Howard at the Conservative Party Conference in October 1993, he proclaimed that 'prison works'. This assertion reversed much of the thinking that had informed the Criminal Justice Act 1991. By early 1997, as a result of the reversal of several important provisions in the 1991 Act by the Criminal Justice Act 1993, the number of prisoners in Britain had risen to 59,000 (Morgan, 1997). This is a huge number of prisoners and in order to try and accommodate this rising number, there was an expansion in the number of prison places. However the number of places made available was not enough and so prison overcrowding resulted. This is not a new phenomenon. Prison overcrowding is predominantly a post-war phenomenon. Since the 1950s, the growth in the prison population has consistently kept ahead of available space in penal institutions. Even though there have been attempts throughout the years to expand the prison estate, for the most part these efforts have been insufficient enough to solve serious overcrowding in the system (Carrabine et al., 2004). Prison programs in the United Kingdom range from carefully designed, extensively monitored experiments for a handful of selected prisoners, to the General Equivalency Diploma classes and trades programs conducted as part of many prisons' normal offerings. With a few exceptions, most of the research on prison rehabilitation has focused on the first type of program, with an emphasis on testing whether a particular program design-'boot camps' or sex-offender treatment or the like- have an effect upon recidivism rates. Yet most prisoners participate not in such programs but, when at all, in routine literacy and educational programs: adult basic education, the General Equivalency Diploma, and some vocational training. Seventy-five percent of all state and federal prisons provide adult basic education, seventy nine percent offer the chance to get a high school diploma or General Equivalency Diploma, fifty five percent provide vocational training, thirty eight percent prison industries, and thirty two percent college-level coursework. Over twenty two percent of all prisoners participate in the educational programs offered. (Clarke, 2004) The most significant goal of the Prison Service is to help prisoners prepare for their return to the community. A single key performance indicator is put forward as the basis for measuring success: the proportion of prisoners held in establishments where prisoners have the opportunity to exceed the minimum visiting entitlement. At the time the key performance indicator was set the minimum visiting requirements were as follows: convicted prisoners were entitled to one visit upon reception and then two visits every twenty-eight days, lasting at least thirty minutes; unconvicted prisoners were entitle either to a visit of at least fifteen minutes every day from Mondays to Saturdays, or to three visits a week which together amounted to at least 1.5 hours. It is surprising that the most significant goal of the service is expressed in such a low-key manner and with such a limited key performance indicator. In this respect it contrasts sharply with the previous goal which, at least in theory if not in terms of its practical measurement, marked an advance over earlier formulations in that it stressed both purposeful activity and the need to address offending behaviour. Conceivably the best that can be said in relation to goal five is that the phrase 'where possible', which conditioned the commitment to assisting prisoners prepare for their return to the community in the former statement of the task of the Prison Service, has been removed. The importance of maintaining family contacts and preparing prisoners for release has increasingly been recognized in recent years. In their advocacy of the 'normalisation of the prison system' McGuire (1995) argued for the abolition of the distinction between local prisons and training prisons and the recommissioning of some twenty-one training prisons as multi-functional local prisons--an early formulation of what are now, more commonly called community prisons. McGuire acknowledged that some prisoners would, for security or other reasons, always need to be kept in more specialist institutions which would be a regional or perhaps a national resource. However, McGuire argued that normalisation would involve as the first of its guidelines 'that prisoners should generally be held in the establishment closest to their community ties so as to maximize their opportunity to maintain family and other links' by minimizing 'the travelling time and expense of programme which the May Committee advocated. They feared two things: that the new prisons would fill up and that the unjustifiable diversion of resources from the local prisons, where half of all prisoners then served the whole of their sentence, into new and largely ineffective training prisons would continue. One of the central vices of prison life is the enforced idleness that inmates must endure. Few prisons provide any meaningful rehabilitation opportunities; in most prisons psychiatric and psychological counseling are nonexistent, and educational programs and vocational training are plainly outdated and inadequate. (Crow, 2001) The gap between the rhetoric of corrections--rehabilitation, education, training, treatment--and the reality of prison life-idleness, despair, solitude, and dehumanisation--grows greater each year. The Manual of Correctional Standards states that the prison's 'basic purpose' is the rehabilitation of those sent there by society. This sentiment is echoed in state statutes, prison regulations, court decisions, legislative reports, and other official pronouncements, but most prison officials continue to believe that 'rehabilitation' is achieved only when the prisoner accepts without question the authoritarian structure and policies of the institution. It should be made clear that we speak of rehabilitation in terms of the opportunity for education and training and not in terms of thought control or institutional conformity. In conclusion, steps should be taken to enhance rehabilitation process in prisons of United Kingdom. Citizens must bring developments in job training, counseling, and halfway houses for rehabilitation to the forefront. If citizens of United Kingdom do not concern and try to make modifications, United Kingdom's crime problem could deteriorate beyond control. Bibliography Carrabine, E., P. Iganski, M. Lee, K. Plummer and N. South (2004) Criminology: A Social Introduction. Routledge: London. Clarke, A. et. al. (2004) Delivering cognitive skills programmes in prison: a qualitative study, Home Office Research Findings 242. Crow, I. (2001) The Treatment and Rehabilitation of Offenders, London: Sage. Chapter 7. Mair, G. (ed) (2004) What Matters in Probation, Cullompton: Willan. Chapter 2. McGuire, J (1995) What Works: Reducing Re-Offending, Chichester: Wiley. Chapter 1. McGuire, J. (2002) Offender Rehabilitation and Treatment, Chichester: Wiley, Chapter 1. Morgan, R (1997) 'Imprisonment', pp. 1137-1194 in M. Maguire, R Morgan and R. Reiner (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology. Oxford University Press: New York. Roberts, C. (2004) 'Offending behaviour programmes: emerging evidence and implications for practice', Chapter 8 in R. Burnett and C. Roberts (eds.) What Works in Probation and Youth Justice, Cullompton: Willan. Read More