The Rehabilitative Ideal: Advance and Temporary Retreat

Abstract

The Gladstone Committee successfully and decisively inserted rehabilitation into official discourses concerning the purposes of the penal system, but implementation of such ideas was to be a slow process spanning many decades. This chapter describes how rehabilitation, originally an aim in search of a method, became largely identified during the middle decades of the twentieth century with the aims and methods of the emerging social work semi-profession. It goes on to describe how rehabilitation suffered a major setback as the century moved into its final quarter, when the industrial societies of the West became sceptical about the cost and effects of the Welfare States which had been built with such effort and commitment only a few decades before. A modernist optimism about the efficacy of a claimed scientific and professional approach gave way to a late-modern doctrine that ‘nothing works’, and for a time it looked as if both the rise and the fall of rehabilitation would be encompassed within less than a century of penal history.