Rehabilitation in culture and practice or simply in ideology?

By Kieran McCartan, Ph.D., David Prescott, LICSW, & Kasia Uzieblo, Ph.D.

One of the authors (Kieran) was teaching about the politics of risk management in the criminal justice system this week. The class focused on the balance between punishment and rehabilitation/treatment. We know that the role of the criminal justice system is to provide punishment for offenses committed and also to provide the opportunity for rehabilitation so that the individuals in question can be integrated back into the community post-release. However, we also know that it's not that simple, that there are different pressures on the criminal justice system that force it more towards punishment than rehabilitation, or (rarely) vice versa. Finally, we know that tools intended for rehabilitative purposes (e.g., risk assessment) are applied to provide punishment instead. Although the balance of punishment and rehabilitation is at the root of important debates, the broader debate has gone on for ages, with little really getting resolved. The results are commonly an agreement that things need to change, with an acknowledgment that they rarely do.

An interesting point in these debates is that we use terms like rehabilitative culture to explain what we do, but the question that we need to ask ourselves is that whether we are really building a culture or more of a hat tip to the idea of it. When we think about culture, we think about a system, a way of doing things that happens in unison with a common purpose. However, in criminal justice, this rarely happens; we often have a gap between ideology and practice, a gap between the way that we want to do things and the way that we are doing things. If we are honest, we also have a gap between how we portray our rehabilitative cultures and the less pleasant realities when we ask the service user’s experiences.

This “rehabilitation gap” often reflects economics, politics, public and professional attitudes, and the media (to name a few) that push policy and practice as well as ideology and implementation further apart. Ideal terms, such as “rehabilitative culture” should reflect values such as a commitment to all aspects of the service users' journey towards successful rehabilitation and community reintegration. However, what we are often left with is a process-driven form of rehabilitation that strives for a cultural underpinning but does not really achieve it; as we’ve seen, many factors can intervene. It is important to note that true rehabilitative culture is a hard thing to achieve and is a practice and a discipline. A bit like a therapeutic community it needs buy-in from everyone and cannot work in a piecemeal fashion.

Is there a difference between a culture that works towards rehabilitation as opposed to a rehabilitative culture? We believe there is. The implications are that we must recognize that our current practices process and outcome-driven without necessarily being culturally embedded. If we want a rehabilitative criminal justice system, we need to be service user-informed, evidence-based, and practice-led. We need to untangle rehabilitation from punishment and look at them as two parallel, interrelated but distinct processes. We have started to do this, but in our review of programs, practices, and policies it often seems that we have a long way to go. In our view, punishment in the absence of opportunities for rehabilitation is cruel.

Questions for front-line professionals might include:

· Does your work setting have a clear mission statement that staff members take to heart?

· Do your clients have a clear understanding of how your treatment completion, rehabilitation, and community reintegration? In other words, do they know what the end of treatment looks like?

· Has your work setting explicitly defined what a rehabilitative culture looks like and how it operates?

· Has your work setting actively sought out the feedback of clients receiving care? Do they agree with your vision of a rehabilitative culture and how it exists in your program?

· Does your work setting have a track record of responding to client feedback? Many agencies collect feedback but do not circle back to tell their clients what changes they are making in response to that feedback.

Anyone who has read the news at all in the past several years will know that no form of culture can ever be taken for granted.