Broken Beyond Repair
Rehabilitative Penology and American Political Development
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6340706 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Anthony Grasso (0009-0005-1753-8127, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 70 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 394-407 |
| Publication date | 2017-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Political Research Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1065-9129 • E-ISSN: 1938-274X |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/1065912917695189 |
| OpenAlex | W2592188063 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 28 |
Research on American criminal justice often concludes that the U.S. penal system was largely guided by the “rehabilitative ideal,” the philosophy that punishment should reform inmates and equip them to lead law-abiding lives, through the twentieth century preceding the rise of mass incarceration. This article complicates this narrative by evaluating the intellectual origins of the rehabilitative ideal and demonstrating that it was built on theoretical premises justifying punitive politics from its inception. The ideal has always relied on distinguishing curable offenders from incorrigible ones who cannot be reformed and warrant harsher punishment. This has guided American state development in punitive directions throughout the twentieth century. Progressive era indeterminate sentencing reforms were geared toward both containing and reforming offenders, the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century relied on the idea of criminal incorrigibility to advocate for compulsory sterilization statutes, and anxieties about incorrigibility justified punitive features of the draconian federal sentencing reforms of the 1970s and 1980s. This history indicates that a full revival of the rehabilitative ideal is unlikely to check contemporary punitive political impulses, especially given that two political and ideational currents currently driving American penal policy—neoliberalism and bio-criminology—comport with the punitive facets of rehabilitative penology
Criminal justice · Criminology · Eugenics · Ideal (ethics · Mass incarceration · Penology · Political science · Politics · Prison · Punishment (psychology · Punitive damages · Sociology · Statute · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Law · Psychology · Psychopathy, Forensic Psychiatry, Sexual Offending · Torture, Ethics, and Law
Doing Justice
Caught
The Crisis of Imprisonment
The Culture of Control
Crime and Public Policy
Knocking the Hustle
The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society
The Condemnation of Blackness
Society Must Be Defended’
The First Civil Right
Ideas and the Spiral of Politics
Rehabilitation in a Red State
The long struggle
The Two Percent Solution
An Introduction to the Study of the Dependent, Defective, and Delinquent Classes
Imbeciles
Creating born criminals
Undoing the Demos
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,67 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2025 (9) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |