NCJ Number
183774
Date Published
2000
Length
226 pages
Annotation
This book examines rehabilitation programs in the specific context of prison life.
Abstract
The book focuses on how rehabilitation programs are implemented and why they tend to fail. Providing an in-depth look at education, job training, and drug treatment programs--and how they are used or misused--the book attempts to explain their high failure rate and how the situation could be improved. Based on extensive observation and more than 350 interviews with staff and prisoners in five medium-security male prisons, the book contrasts successfully implemented programs with subverted, abandoned, or neglected programs, i.e., those which staff reject or which do not teach prisoners anything useful. The book explains that staff and prisoners have little patience with programs aimed at long-range goals when they must face the ongoing, immediate challenge of surviving prison life. The book is divided into an Introduction, five chapters and a Conclusion: (1) “This Place Just by Being Here Is Not Going to Correct You”: The Rediscovery of Rehabilitation; (2) Revisiting Rehabilitation: Why “What Works” Is the Wrong Question; (3) Keeping the Peace: Institutional Needs, Institutional Values, and Implementation; (4) Unsuccessful Implementation: The Use and Abuse of Programs; (5) Successful Implementation: Keeping Busy and Helping Yourself; (6) The Importance of Successful Implementation: Recasting the Debate over Mandatory and Voluntary Programs; and (7) Deliberately Successful Implementation: Doing Time, Doing My Time, and Letting the Time Do Me. Notes, tables, appendixes, bibliography, index