Treatment and Rehabilitation

Reform in Historical Context

The eighteenthand nineteenth-century transition from brutal forms of corporal punishment to palliative techniques of treatment and rehabilitation has been a special object of inquiry for its suggestions about broader cultural shifts and changing power relations. Yet the individual criminal's transformation from a lawbreaking to a law-abiding citizen has historically been an ambition of American penality. In the pious American colonies, corporal punishments were designed to invoke shame and repentance in “sinners” through public ritual and display; transgressors were publicly whipped, displayed on the stalks, and had their ears cropped and cheeks sliced. The condemned were marched through towns, sometimes for several miles, then positioned at the gallows where they confessed their misdeeds, prayed for forgiveness, and cautioned others to obey God's law.

Following the American Revolution, individual transformation was to occur through confinement in the penitentiary and labor both within and outside of the penitentiary. Confinement in the penitentiary reflected and brought forth new ways of knowing, studying, controlling, and transforming deviant subjects. It also displayed the “civilized” sensibilities and economic hopes of a growing industrialized nation. The early penitentiaries in Auburn, New York, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, ordered congregate and individual labor, respectively, during the day and solitary confinement at night. In step with developing industrialism, the reform-through-labor model carried over into the first half of the twentieth century in the form of factory labor. Penal labor throughout this time period tended to be racialized and gendered, reflecting the dominant institutional divisions. Seen as largely incorrigible, newly freed blacks who broke the law were for several decades forced to work on treacherous Southern chain gangs, while sexually “deviant” women could be sent to cottages where they learned “proper” female tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and sewing in homelike settings.

Treatment and rehabilitation as we conceive of them today come from several twentieth-century developments constituting a remedial regime known as “penal welfarism.” Probation and parole emerged during the Progressive Era as supplements to incarceration designed to facilitate the offender's transition into the law-abiding lifestyle. Early probation and parole officers coordinated with local merchants to supply jobs for probationers and parolees whose main task was gainful employment. The turn of the twentieth century also saw the birth of the juvenile justice system, whose defining purposes were diversion from the iatrogenic effects of criminal sanctions and the provision of services to guide young people into adulthood. Perceived as victims of poor parenting, immigrant neighborhoods, and urban enticements, “delinquents” landed in juvenile courts alongside “defective” and “dependent” children where the common source of problems was the child's pernicious environment and the goal to save children. Psychotherapy and psychiatry were introduced into the penitentiary in the 1950s, and the concomitant view of criminal behavior as a symptom of faulty socialization and other psychological ailments that could be alleviated through the procedures of psychology and psychiatry. While Progressive Era criminology had identified social and psychological origins of criminal behavior, it was during this mid-twentiethcentury period that a therapeutic regime of “corrections” emerged.

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