The Justice Model

Abstract

By the mid-1970s, the chorus of criticism of rehabilitative penal systems, the various refrains of which we have just outlined, had reached a crescendo. Though this criticism, as we have seen, was expressed by disparate voices, speaking from a diversity of perspectives, certain themes recurred and formed a litany of demands for reform. Taken together, these themes comprise the agenda that became known as the ‘justice model’ of corrections. This reform agenda emerged from a loose and temporary convergence of interest of the three groups of critics of rehabilitationism described in the last chapter. The justice model was most selfconsciously formulated by the liberal lawyers anxious to restore due process to the heart of the justice system, and in many ways it is ‘their’ model. It was, however, eagerly adopted by many radicals among both criminal justice practitioners and among academics, partly because it seemed to offer the prospect of progress in correcting the abuses of rehabilitationism, and partly because, having not pursued their criticism of prison regimes and procedures through to an agenda for abolition of imprisonment, there was a vacuum left in the area of radical-left reform proposals, a vacuum which was irresistably filled by the justice model (Clarke, 1978).

and woe to him who rummages around in the winding paths of a theory of happiness looking for some advantage to be gained by releasing the criminal from punishment or by reducing the amount of it. (Kant, 1970)