Rehabilitating Rehabilitation

By being offender-oriented, rehabilitation differs from the other three justifications for punishment--deterrence, incapacitation, and retribution--all of which are offense-oriented. Rehabilitation, with its belief in the redemptive possibilities of punishment and its emphasis on treating and curing offenders individually, emerged during the Progressive Era and served as the dominant justification for punishment in the United States from the 1940s to the early 1970s. But with the public's recent abandonment of rehabilitation as the justification for punishment, sentences in the United States have become increasingly lengthy. Learn more about the policy of rehabilitating offenders—and how it has suffered in recent years—in this article, made available by The World & I Online.