Rehabilitation (penology)

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Rehabilitation means; To restore to useful life, as through therapy and education or To restore to good condition, operation, or capacity. The assumption of rehabilitation is that people are not natively criminal and that it is possible to restore a criminal to a useful life, to a life in which they contribute to themselves and to society. Rather than punishing the harm out of a criminal, rehabilitation would seek, by means of education or therapy, to bring a criminal into a more normal state of mind, or into an attitude which would be helpful to society, rather than be harmful to society.

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See also: Wikibooks:Social Deviance
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This theory of punishment is based on the notion that punishment is to be inflicted on an offender so as to reform him/her, or rehabilitate them so as to make their re-integration into society easier. Punishments that are in accordance with this theory are community service, probation orders, and any form of punishment which entails any form of guidance and aftercare towards the offender.

This theory is founded on the belief that one cannot inflict a severe punishment of imprisonment and expect the offender to be reformed and to be able to re-integrate into society upon his release. Although the importance of inflicting punishment on those persons who breach the law, so as to maintain social order, is retained, the importance of rehabilitation is also given priority. Humanitarians have, over the years, supported rehabilitation as an alternative, even for capital punishment.

Rehabilitation theories present however the following deficiencies:

First, there are no sound scientific research to determine how different individuals react to the same rehabilitating methods.

Second, rehabilitation may depend more decisively on the individual psychological background, hence on his particular motives to commit crimes, than on the rehabilitating methods or philosophy.

Third, a rehabilitation program may prove to be too costly and complex to be successfully implemented in most countries.

Finally, rehabilitation must refer to the sociological findings on the socialization and resocialization processes, as change in life-long socially acquired patterns of behavior and values entails a much more complex – and sometime traumatic – change on the individual's structure of character.