Martinson, Robert

Robert Magnus Martinson (1927–80) was a professor of sociology at the City College of New York. His name has become synonymous with the “nothing works” view of rehabilitation, and he is sometimes credited with ending the rehabilitation movement and ushering in a conservative era of just deserts. This is ironic, since Martinson almost certainly did not intend to contribute to severer punishment in the United States.

Martinson attended college at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his B.A. in 1949, his M.A. in 1953, and his Ph.D. in 1968. His M.A. thesis focused on the role of the Communist Party as a totalitarian organization in the Spanish Civil War, and his Ph.D. dissertation examined organizational change in the context of treatment ideology and correctional bureaucracy. Martinson supported civil rights, participating in the Freedom Rides from New Orleans to Jackson, Mississippi, where he was arrested in June 1961 for breach of the peace and incarcerated for 40 days.

In 1968, along with Douglas Lipton and Judith Wilks, Martinson was hired by the New York State Governor's Special Committee on Criminal Offenders to conduct a systematic appraisal of rehabilitation programs. Many of these programs—featuring education, vocational training, counseling, medical treatment, parole, or community supervision—had been touted as viable remedies for recidivism. Lipton, Martinson, and Wilks reviewed 231 English-language studies of rehabilitative programs undertaken between 1945 and 1967, comparing the experimental groups (which received treatment interventions) with control groups (which did not). They focused particularly on recidivism rates.

The researchers produced a 1,400-page report, concluding that rehabilitation programs did not appear to have a demonstrable effect on recidivism. However, New York State, afraid of the political consequences of the study, refused to issue their report and prohibited the researchers from releasing their findings independently. Eventually, however, the report was introduced as evidence in a court case, and the state authorized the authors to publish their findings as a book. In 1975, they published The Effectiveness of Correctional Treatment: A Survey of Treatment Evaluation Studies.

Their book was critical of rehabilitation and its effects on recidivism but did not reach a novel conclusion (many social scientists had been critical of rehabilitation) and did not have much impact on policy (it was a 736-page scholarly monograph). This was not true, however, of Martinson's 1974 [Page 249]article, “What Works? Questions and Answers About Prison Reform.” Published in The Public Interest, Martinson's distillation of the results from the New York recidivism study were highly influential and immediately catapulted him into the national spotlight.

This was, in part, a function of an existing dissatisfaction with the state of punishment in America. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, progressive reformers had criticized the government for its paternalism and for its use of coercive power to “treat” offenders, not to help these individuals but to maintain social order. Correctional officials and parole boards, it was claimed, exercised unfettered discretion over the lives of others. Conservatives joined in this criticism, though not because correctional officials were racist or class-biased in how they used their discretion but because they were seen as too lenient. Instead of coddling criminals with rehabilitation, conservatives argued, criminals should be punished. Martinson's article attracted attention by appealing to both camps and providing them with a scientific foundation for their respective ideologies.

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