Cards (9)

    • Rehabilitation is the idea that punishment can be used to reform or change offenders so they no longer offend and can go on to live a crime-free life. Rather than focusing on punishing past behaviour and offences as retribution does, and instead using rehabilitation that uses various treatment programmes to change offenders future behaviours by addressing the issues that causes their original behaviour/offending.  
    • Young person punishing, under 25- is heavier based around rehabilitation as a way to face the consequences of their actions as sentences may have a harsher impact when rejoining the community due to them having less stability and still being developing. Due to still developing, young people are also more likely to change, therefore community payback (offenders work on projects for the community to payback their crimes) may be best.
    • Some prisons help to build prisoners back into society by helping build bonds by bringing their families back into sessions before release. They aim to change the attitudes and behaviours by building up links, hopes and connections to society. Teaching them about their identity in a positive setting and their rights and roles.
    • Examples of rehabilitation within sentencing:
      -       Drug and alcohol abuse programmes
      -       Anger management courses
      -       Aversion therapies
      -       Community sentences
      -       Education and training (helps a person reconsider their behaviour and rationally choose alternatives, it also helps prisoners avoid unemployment etc. on release.)
    • Left realism is about helping to avoid criminality rather than punishing what’s happened as seen in their sure start centres etc., therefore they would support the concept of rehabilitation due to it helping reform and change offenders behaviours. They also regard social factors such as unemployment, poverty and poor educational opportunities as causes of crime, therefore addressing these needs among offenders will help to reduce offending.
    • Cognitive theories favour cognitive behavioural therapies (CBT) to teach offenders to correct the faulty thinking and biases that they have which are leading to their aggressive and incorrect criminal behaviour.
       
      Eysenck’s personality theory favors the use of aversion therapy to deter offending behaviour. This is where a person is over exposed to their addiction and makes an association between it and an unpleasant stimulus which conditions them to not want to continue with their addiction/criminal behaviour.
    • Skinners operant conditioning theory supports the use of token economies as it encourages prisoners to produce more acceptable behaviours as they have been conditioned to behave well for the positive sanction of tokens.
    • Criticisms of rehabilitation:
      -       Right realists argue that rehabilitation only has limited success, in that many offenders go on to re-offend even after undergoing programmes aimed at changing behaviors because in some way they may see the treatments, especially educational ones, as rewards and it could even encourage the criminality as a way to gain access to them.
    • Criticisms of rehabilitation:
      -       Marxists theory is based around capitalism being the cause of crime due to it being criminogenic, therefore they think that rehabilitation just shifts the fault onto the individual offenders failing rather than where the failings stemmed from, being the capitalist society that they live in.
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