There is always a difficulty in dealing with the topic of criminal rehabilitation as a unified topic, because there are just too many causes of criminal behavior. There are far too many areas of human frailty that must be dealt with in our prison population. And many of those areas involve people who cannot be rehabilitated at all.
When dealing with drug related crimes, for example, the rehabilitation issues include curing drug addiction, sociopathy and personality disorders, severe mental illness, past physical and emotional trauma, generational poverty, lack of education, and other issues that relate directly to the drug culture that has taken over major segments of society throughout the world. The sociopath or psychopath who is an incurable lifelong criminal is vastly different from the new addict who desires a normal life and has been begging for drug rehabilitation and methadone maintenance, but turned down due to lack of resources.
When dealing with social and mental pathologies, the character that is formed by puberty is generally the character that is formed for life, unless intensive efforts are accomplished by the individual, with the help of intensive therapy by a costly, highly qualified professional.The operative concept is that the individual has to accomplish the change. The professional can only help.
Layering the onset of serious mental illness or drug addiction on top of the already formed character, results in a criminal mindset which may be malignant or benign. Such prisoners carry an incredible set of roadblocks to successful rehabilitation. Highly skilled professional help is extremely unavailable to individuals who have no assets and who are already in the criminal justice system. Even well off criminals who have severe mental disorders or addictions are not going to rehabilitate, but are housed in regular prisons instead of medical facilities. They should not even be counted as criminals who qualify for rehabilitation, but as patients.
As a result, looking at “success” in our efforts to rehabilitate requires excluding those who cannot be repaired. For those who are aggressive in their own efforts to be restored to a normal path in life, there are many success stories. But, sadly, the majority of those who have lifelong addictions and social, addictive, or mental disorders return to jail. The standard proportions are that 1 0f 3, or 25% of prisoners return to jail within a year of release.
Most successful attempts to provide training, education, counseling, and other “repair” methods do work on those who can respond to the support and stay away from pre incarceration homes, lifestyles, and influences that lead them right back into crime.
But even extensive post incarceration support and programs are useless when resources and staffing are cut, probation officers and counselors are overloaded to the point of incompetency, and the individual returns to the very source of their problems: their home, lifestyle, and social relationships of origin.
In other words, rehabilitation is not happening with enough quantity, quality, and dedication of resources to even talk about the subject. Also, efforts to rehabilitate those who will not change or improve are directing the limited resources away from those who could benefit.
Until there is reform in the entire construct of crime, punishment and the very definition of who is capable of rehabilitation, as well as a rational increase in allocation of resources, there might as well not be a discussion of whether or not rehabilitation has been, or will be successful.
Marty Angelo Ministries “Interesting Statistics”.
