The Rehabilitative Ideal Meets an Aroused Public: the Patuxent Experiment Revisited

Abstract

The author examines the latest changes in Maryland's Patuxent Institution resulting from the 1988 revisions in the state's Article 31B (the so-called “Eligible Persons” statute, originally the “Defective Delinquency” statute). He argues that these changes, the latest in an increasingly restrictive series of modifications in the law, resulted from the failure of the institution's staff to overcome its isolation from the evolving standards by which the community judges its efforts to punish and/or rehabilitate serious criminal offenders.