Differential Association and Rehabilitation

Abstract

While the group relations principle of rehabilitation is generally accepted by sociologists and social psychologists, there has been no organized effort by sociologists-criminologists to experiment with it or to base techniques of treatment on it. As indicated in the previous chapter, sociologists have emphasized the idea that they can make unique contributions to clinical diagnoses, and they have advocated the development of a “clinical sociology” which would enable us to improve these diagnoses.¹ But here an impasse is reached, for if a case of criminality is attributed to the individual’s group relations, there is little that can be done in the clinic to modify the diagnosed cause of the criminality. Moreover, extra-clinical work with criminals and delinquents ordinarily has merely extended the clinical principle to the offender’s community and has largely ignored the group-relations principle. For example, in the “group work” of correctional agencies the emphasis usually is upon the role of the group merely in satisfying the needs of an individual, so that the criminal may be induced to join an “interest-activity” group, such as a hiking club, on the assumption that membership in the group will somehow enable him to overcome the defects or tendencies considered conducive to delinquency.² Similarly, Chapter VIII has shown that in correctional group therapy the emphasis is on the use of a group to enable the individual to rid himself of undesirable psychological disorders, not criminality. Even in group-work programmes directed at entire groups, such as delinquent gangs, emphasis often is on new and different formal group activities rather than on new group attitudes and values.