Rehabilitation Paper

Rehabilitation Paper
Jimmy Bolden
CJA/234
July 15, 2015
Yolonda Johnson
Rehabilitation Paper
The great significance of rehabilitation has encountered flows and ebbs all across the history of corrections. Rehabilitating criminal offenders has been supported by the public. Eighty-eight percent of rehabilitative programs support inmate work programs to make products, perform services, or construct buildings, ninety-four percent of rehabilitative programs support requiring offenders to be able to write and read before being released from prison, and ninety-three percent of rehabilitative programs support prisoners’ learning a trade or skill.
Raynor, P., Robinson, G., & Campling, J. (2009). Rehabilitation, crime and justice (p. 175). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
The definition of rehabilitation is the restoration of past abilities, authority, rights, privileges, rank, health, or condition. According to Foster (2006) his definition of rehabilitation is “rehabilitation represented a perspective that said one purpose of imprisonment was to promote positive change in the prisoner during confinement. This perspective would be officially abandoned during the 1970s, but it remains part of the prison vocabulary, and it retains adherents among corrections officials, scholars, prisoners, and the public”. The origins of rehabilitation focused on forcing an inmate to consider both the error of his or her ways, the gravity of the crime committed, and why good conduct and further avoidance of crime would be beneficial. The initial origins of the penitentiary were created by the Quakers, and reinforced by religious fervor for a ‘black and white’ application of the law. What the Quakers believed in was penance, the suffering of punishment inducing the prisoner to express sorrow for his sins and to promise to do good to make up for his evil acts; social change based on the religious transformation that took place within the penitentiary. The penitentiary was a place for penitents to do penance. This was intended to take place in isolation, as one might meditate alone in one’s room. “There is a sharp emphasis on self-responsibility as a major prerequisite in this new variant of rehabilitationism. It is rehabilitation with certain demands on the offender and is perhaps most graphically demonstrated in the exponential growth in recent years of psychology-based interventions in England and Wales, especially in custodial settings” (Raynor, P., Robinson, G., & Campling, J., 2009). According to Woodard (2011) he defines parole as “the release of an imprisoned offender who agrees to established rules even though he or she has to be closely monitored for a given period”. This release is provisional and allows the offender to serve the remaining term from within the community. This differs from mandatory release in different ways. Essentially, the parole boards have the discretion to either accord or deny the parole. This is unlike mandatory release that does not require any decision- making process. The rules for mandatory release are distinct, and its accordance or denial depends on the qualification of the offender.