Recently in Rehabilitation Category

One of the most persistent errors of people who set out to reform criminal law is the idea that the people who have committed the most horrible crimes are just like us down deep.  The Quakers created the "penitentiary" way back in the late eighteenth century believing that criminals, if confined, would be penitent and reflect deeply and remorsefully on what they had done.  After all, that is what the good Quakers would do if they had deeply sinned.

Well, they aren't like us, and they don't reflect deeply and repent.  John Christoffersen has this story for AP from Connecticut:

The Connecticut killer who once called himself one of the most hated men in America said in a death row interview that he tries not to think about the murder of a suburban mother and her two daughters, suffers no nightmares and has nothing to say to the only survivor of the brutal 2007 attack.

Joshua Komisarjevsky told The Associated Press in his first interview since he was convicted that there isn't anything he could say to Dr. William Petit "that will restore the lives lost."

He also declined an opportunity to express remorse for the killings.

"I guess my reaction is not the reaction society expected," Komisarjevsky said.

It's exactly the reaction I expected.

Say you have an opening in your accounting department.  Wouldn't you like to know if an applicant is a convicted embezzler?  The government just might want to prevent you from learning that, under the banner of "disparate impact."  The WSJ has this editorial:

The Obama Administration's favorite antidiscrimination tool is "disparate impact," which relies on statistics to allege racial prejudice, regardless of intent. The Justice Department is using it to lean on banks to lend to more minorities, and now we hear the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission wants to use it to wield more power over business hiring.

Several sources tell us the Commission is working on policy guidance that would significantly limit companies' use of credit and criminal histories in hiring under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. A Commission spokeswoman declined to comment by email, "citing Agency practice barring public discussion of any policy that may or may not be in development."

Employment of people with criminal histories is an important issue in rehabilitation, and we don't want to choke off opportunity entirely.  After all, if the person really does want to go straight, employment is a big part of that effort.  Even so, for some jobs we do not anyone with certain kinds of histories.  We don't want embezzlers in accounting.  We don't want child molesters in day care.

Can the present Administration be trusted to give employers the necessary leeway?  I see no reason to be confident of that.

The title of this post is the title of a piece in NRO about Chuck Colson, one-time Nixon hatchet man.  Colson went to prison for his part in the Watergate scandal, and is probably best known now for starting Prison Fellowship, a group that purports to help rehabilitate inmates through Bible study.

has been debased in our Tilt-a-Whirl media culture that can't distinguish between notoriety and fame. In contemporary America, redemption begins sometime between the first check-in into rehab and the first cable-TV interview, and reaches completion when everyone gets distracted by someone else's attention-grabbing disgrace.

Colson left government after Nixon's reelection, feeling exhausted and empty. As the furor over Watergate grew, he visited a friend one night, a successful businessman who had converted to Christianity. The friend read a passage from C. S. Lewis: "Pride always means enmity -- it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God." Later, Colson sat in his car outside the house weeping alone in the darkness, not tears of sadness nor of joy, but "of relief."

When he realized that the exigencies of his legal defense were inconsistent with the forthrightness entailed by his new faith, he pleaded guilty and became Prisoner 23226 at Maxwell Federal Prison Camp in Alabama.

It's one of the routine conceits of the liberal/professorial view of the world that criminal law hardliners are a bunch of cowboys/dopes/wahoos, while legal academia is laced with nuance, reflection and cool reason.  If there's even a trace of embarrassment about, or even recognition of, this wonderfully self-flattering portrait, I have yet to detect it.

One of the mechanisms for polishing such a cozy view of professional life is the publication of articles in this journal or that, any number of which show up in SSRN.  Publication creates the aura of scholarship  --  an aura especially easy to maintain when those who do the "reviewing" share an identical, We Know Better view of the criminal justice system.

The resulting hothouse of liberal platitudes occasionally produces something so palpably absurd, however, as to become an unconscious self-parody.  It happened today on Sentencing Law and Policy, which featured a gem titled, "Judge orders felons to write 5-page essays." 

 

From Ms. Rehab herself, Ms. Lindsay Lohan:  "I'm gonna do what I'm told to do."

Don't believe me?  Hey, it's on tape.

I know, I know.  The Lohan story is a cheap trick at this point.  On the other hand, so is rehab, so why not just laugh at the joke?

The "smart on crime" folks want us to believe that the experts know how to fix criminals, despite the disastrous consequences of our falling for that line in the 1960s.  This is not just in the United States.  Martin Bentham reports for the London Evening Standard:

A flagship Met police scheme to cut crime among convicts freed from jail has had no impact on the reoffending rate, an official study revealed today.

The £11 million "Diamond Initiative" was set up to rehabilitate serial offenders by offering them help with problems such as drug and alcohol misuse, housing, debt and unemployment after their release.

Scotland Yard chiefs hoped that the scheme, which focused on criminals freed after sentences of 12 months or less, would lead to a significant drop in reoffending and help to deliver the "rehabilitation revolution" wanted by Justice Secretary Ken Clarke.

An official analysis of the project has found, however, that 42.4 per cent of participants committed new crimes within a year of leaving jail - almost identical to the 41.6 per cent reoffending rate among a similar group of convicts who received no special help after being freed.

We have no objection to trying out programs on a limited scale and subjecting them to rigorous testing to see what, if anything, "works."  But until there is proof, not just "evidence," we should not abandon the tough sentencing practices that helped produce the dramatic drop in crime rates in the 1990s, and we should not return to the blind faith in the "experts" that produced disastrous results in the past.