Rehabilitation as Beating the Rap: The Structural Ambivalence of Correction

Abstract

The rehabilitation worker who tries to reconcile what he does with what he thinks his work is supposed to accomplish can do so only by ignoring certain realities that constitute the penal setting for his activities and other realities that define his client's world. By contrast, the client's insight into this world and his perspective on rehabilitation are unencumbered by the worker's ideology; they are determined experientially. The price paid for subordinating this insight and perspective to agency needs is the continuing inability of rehabilitation to extract from the penal system the resources and handling that would enable workers to pursue their professed goals more effectively and with less conflict. This subordination perpetuates a closed system whose main "advantage" is that it enables success to be defined and measured in terms of whatever official activities are occurring and in light of organizational needs. The assertion of client interests will occur as a result of realizing the extent to which continuation of the present system depends on client participation and coopera tion. This assertion will produce new alignments, techniques consistent with goals, and ultimately revolutionary changes in the administration of criminal justice.