Should We Only Consider Rehabilitation When Sentencing?

By: Liu Kecan

In our progressive world today, many view our current criminal justice system with draconian punishments and long detentions to be incongruent and incompatible with the liberal values that we dearly enshrine. An increasing number of people champion for rehabilitation to be the only factor of consideration during sentencing, viewing it to be both beneficial for the convicts and the state. Yet although it does present some merit, only considering this line of logic in criminal sentencing leads to more harm to both the state and the goal of a more progressive society.

I would first like to lay out some definitions before I start my essay. In this essay, rehabilitation will be defined as the widely agreed process where treatment and training are applied to the offender to make him capable of returning to society and functioning as a law-abiding member of the community. Such rehabilitation is achieved through processes of positive criminology, where convicts are given rights and amenities similar to the outside world.

The main argument proffered by the champions of rehabilitation will be its ability to reduce recidivism much better than the status quo. They argue that criminals commit crimes not because they have an insatiable desire to cause harm to society due to their greed or desires (and thus must be punished), but because it's the only viable choice for their survival. When special counselling is administered for such criminals to change their behaviour in confluence with training to equip such criminals with employable skills, convicts will be given the opportunity to escape the dictatorship of no alternatives, the vicious cycle of poverty and crime, reducing re-offending rates. They draw the example of Norway, where humane prisons with various amenities help give the nation the lowest international recidivism rate of 20%. In contrast, they argue that the use of retributive penance such as corporeal punishment will only serve to further alienate the already disenfranchised convicts, where convicts will view that both the state and society antagonize and demonise them, causing such convicts to be even less willing to reform their behaviour. As such, only rehabilitation should be the consideration in sentencing.

Yet, this argument is a mere careless overgeneralization of the nuances of criminal justice into one singular objective: the correction of criminal behaviour. Apart from rectifying the criminal’s attitudes, criminal justice also has an unduly moral obligation to serve “justice” to the victims of the offense, a sense of closure that the criminal receives pain to the same extent caused by his actions, and this can only be achieved through retributory penalization proportional to the crimes and harm he inflicts. When criminal justice systems only consider rehabilitation, such notions of proportionality and justice are lost, and the intrinsic moral principle that wrongdoers must be punished is also undercut. A murderer can get to while his time away in a rehabilitative centre, escaping the gallows and the lengthy prison sentence he would otherwise have been handed. It will lead to the justice system being unable to fulfil the most fundamental goals it was set to achieve; the regulation of society conforming with moral codes. 

Apart from subverting the principles that society holds dear, rehabilitation as the only consideration also causes immense practical consequences. When the public views that the criminal justice system has not adequately punished criminals, instead of putting trust in the legal system, society is much more likely to take justice into their own hands, crippling the legal system as a whole. Many victims and members of the community, viewing that the punishment is not enough for the harm the criminal caused, will very likely take vengeance against their suspects in a manner that is far more disproportionate than even the most punitive justice systems in the world, sabotaging the aim of a more humane penal system. Worse of all, apart from taking unlawful and grossly extreme revenge, the very ‘suspects’ that these people arrest are subjectively detained without proper investigation or legal trial, resulting in many innocents being falsely accused and persecuted. A parallel to this hypothetical legal system can be drawn in the UK. Viewing the police to be ineffective, many set up paedophile watch groups that routinely use extortion and violence in their operations, wrongly asserting individuals to be criminals and sometimes leading the innocent to their deaths. It is thus clear that rehabilitation being the only consideration of sentencing is not just a principled matter, but also leads to problems that bring along concrete harm against both society and the goal of achieving a more progressive, liberal society.

It is also important for this essay to dwell on the concept of deterrence. Like how George Savile puts it, “Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen”, punishment exists as an efficient and effective way of sending out the important message that a particular action constitutes a crime, something that is wrong and detrimental to the state, and that it should not be committed. This is made clear by a study conducted by famed American economist Steven Levitt, where “evidence linking increased punishment to drastically reducing the crime rates in the United States in the 90s [to be] very strong”.  When inmates get near uncurtailed rights and unfettered access to amenities in rehabilitative facilities, however, the idea of punishment is diluted, and the message propagated to be weakened. This leads to increased crime rates, as possible offenders will be much more inclined to carry out a crime, as they may feel that there will be few consequences even if he/she is eventually detained, making it clear that criminal behaviour increases with rehabilitation as the only sentencing concern.

In conclusion, although rehabilitation is beneficial, using it alone causes more harm than good. A model criminal justice system should seamlessly incorporate all the pillars of criminal justice to create a system that punishes proportionately while also putting emphasis on the reintegration of such offenders through education and training.

References

Encyclopedia Britannica. 2022. punishment - Rehabilitation. [online] Available at: <https://www.britannica.com/topic/punishment/Rehabilitation> [Accessed 29 May 2022].

Sterbenz, C., 2022. Why Norway's prison system is so successful. [online] Business Insider. Available at: <https://www.businessinsider.com/why-norways-prison-system-is-so-successful-2014-12?op=1&r=US&IR=T> [Accessed 29 May 2022].

Halkon, R., 2022. The public are the police: What happens when citizens take the law into their own hands?. [online] The Police Foundation. Available at: <https://www.police-foundation.org.uk/2019/11/the-public-are-the-police-what-happens-when-citizens-take-the-law-into-their-own-hands/> [Accessed 29 May 2022].

Levitt, S., 2004. Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 18(1), pp.163-190.