The criminal justice system in Britain often relies upon labels in order to deal with offenders. Individualised rehabilitative treatment is both expensive and time consuming and it is far easier to set a few different standard treatment pathways and then to divide offenders according to easily applied labels in order to determine which pathway would be most appropriate to their treatment needs. However, not only does labelling in this way preclude the delivery of treatment in the most effective way possible (i.e. on an individualised basis), it is also easy to apply the wrong labels.
The problem here is that, just as history is written by the victors, labels ore decided upon and fixed by those in power. An offender is never able to determine their own labels, they are applied externally. Even the term ‘rehabilitation’ itself is a label which (although differently interpreted by each and every individual) is given a fixed, non-negotiable definition by the criminal justice system.
This is exactly why imprisoning people to rehabilitate them or sticking them on community sentences with the same goal or in deed probation will never work. If the rehabilitation is not targeted to the individual personality and circumstances true change will never occur
I completely agree, Cait. Teaching has come a long way in the last 100 years precisely because it has finally been recognised that people have different learning styles, so I am amazed that a one size fits all approach is still applied to rehabilitation. Is educational development really any different to rehabilitative development? It’s all learning after all.