Reexamining Martinson's Critique: A Cautionary Note for Evaluators

Abstract

In 1974, Robert Martinson, an adjunct assistant professor at the City College of New York, published an article titled “What Works?—Questions and Answers About Prison Reform” (Martinson, 1974). In it, he summarized the results of a 3-year project—Effectiveness of Correctional Treatment (ECT)—which reviewed the effectiveness of 231 offender rehabilitation programs that had been evaluated during the prior 30 years (see also Lipton, Martinson, & Wilks, 1975). Based on his analysis of what was the most extensive offender treatment database that existed at that time, he concluded that “with few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism” (p. 25).

Martinson's article has since been cited, perhaps naively, as one of the precipitating factors that quashed the treatment-oriented zeitgeist of the 1970s. In truth, Martinson may have provided an invaluable service to the rehabilitation movement by inadvertently giving human form to the undercurrents of skepticism that already existed. Thanks to Martinson, a once fragmented cadre of researchers and clinicians found themselves working in concert to refute what Martinson himself later described as a mischaracterization of his argument. But in these fevered attempts to prove Martinson wrong and, in some cases, vilify him personally, we may have ignored the most important part of his message.