Page 594 begins here
literature on both the implementation of social policy and the study of prisons. Lin, an assistant professor of
political science and public policy at the University of Michigan, has written an important and convincing book
on the implementation of rehabilitation policies within the prison. Although not a history of the low-visibility
life of the rehabilitative practices since the idea was prematurely pronounced dead two decades ago, the first
part of the book does provide an overview of the ways rehabilitation programs have fared in recent years and the
variety of functions such programs serve within correctional institutions. These chapters alone are worth the
price of the book.
However, the heart of the book is a close and careful look at the implementation of rehabilitation programs
in five quite different prisons across the United States. The book addresses three factors that many skeptics
believe doom prison rehabilitation programs from the outset: (1) such programs are directed specifically at those
who have explicitly rejected the very things that criminal rehabilitative programs seek to foster-conforming to
society's norms and values; (2) the inherent adversarial relationship between guards and prisoners breeds bitterness
and contempt, and successful rehabilitative programming depends on a modicum of trust and
mutual respect; and (3) there is no strong evidence from the past that rehabilitative programs have ever worked.
Her book takes up these three challenges "to the reigning skepticism about rehabilitation" (p. 5).
Its innovation and great contribution is how it frames the issues. Rather than framing the question as, "Does
or can rehabilitation really work?" she frames it as a question of policy implementation -- what are the conditions
under which rehabilitative programs can be implemented successfully? Once asked, this is obvious. However, she
is to be commended for asking the obvious. As she points out, much literature on rehabilitation to date asks a
global question about the transformative effects of rehabilitative programming, or it takes the larger institutional
setting as a given, distinct from the
programs themselves, and focuses only on the long-term effects of the program. Obviously it is reasonable to inquire
whether institutional programs have a long-term, down-stream effect. However, it may not always be so sensible.
It may be too ambitious. For instance, we may be interested in whether a particular method for teaching reading
to seven year-olds has an effect on future employment prospects or fosters socialization. As important as these
concerns are, they are much too much to hang on a single, limited program. Rather, we are more likely to search
for more proximate consequences: do the reading skills of participants improve over those exposed to other methods?
Or, what would their reading level been had had there been no new program? Also, if there is improvement, is
it worth the effort?
These are the sorts of more modest but important concerns that Lin raises in her thoughtful and well-conceived
book. These concerns are presented squarely when she convincingly argues that the questions to be asked must be
framed by a concern with policy implementation. But this is only the initial issue she raises. Urging and then
embracing a policy implementation perspective allows her to make another hitherto unappreciated point. She criticizes
both policymakers and researchers for their failure to see ordinary, routine (rehabilitation) programs separately
from the organizations in which they in which they are housed. "Programs are
evaluated," she observes, "but organizations described" (p. 8). She continues, arguing that as
a result of
Page 595 begins here
this separation, "evaluators tend to expect that organizations can be changed to accommodate programs, while
organization theorists tend to explain that programs are inevitably changed by the organizations implementing them"
(p. 8). In contrast, she seeks to see how rehabilitation programs fit into and are part of the larger
organizations of which they are a part. Hers is a classic implementation study, showing how while program administrators
pursue program aims, the programs are also shaped by their environments and in turn the programs affect the environments.
This is perhaps obvious to students of implementation, but it is novel and exciting for those thinking about rehabilitation
programs in prisons.
The core of her study is a close look at programs in five different medium security, male prisons across
the United States. Four of them are federal prisons and one is a state facility. Although they vary widely in
structure, organization, and staff-inmate ratio, she emphasizes that none of them would be mistaken for a treatment
center or therapeutic community. They are prisons. However, she finds that the quality of programs varies widely
among these five institutions. In a careful assessment of both the programs and the institutional conditions surrounding
them, she finds that programs "work" when they are well-designed AND when there is real (as opposed to
only formal) institutional support for them. Programs did not work, she found, in three of the five institutions.
The reason was that although on paper each of the prisons had a set of policies that promoted rehabilitation,
in practice they were never given a chance. Institutional constraints undermined them at every turn. No one on
the staff had any real interest, let alone confidence in their value. In effect, she argues, it does not make
sense to ask, "What works?" or to judge them as failures since the programs were never even minimally
implemented or taken seriously. They were doomed from the outset. Since they didn't really start an effort they
can't even be judged to have failed. In contrast, she finds that in two other institutions the programs did "work"
in the sense that they began to accomplish the modest goals that had been set for them. The differences between
the settings where the programs worked and where they did not even get off the ground (as opposed to failed), she
argues, is the environment. In the two "successful" prisons, leadership and staff believed in the programs
and sought to make
them work. In the "failures," there was never any sustained effort to try to make them work. Although
all five prisons experienced a great many setbacks and opposition to the programs, she found that in the two institutions
where the programs worked, this opposition was never sufficient to derail the enterprise as it was in the three
institutions where the programs did not work. Institutional commitment to the programs (and not teacher-pupil
ratio, criminal histories of participants, etc.), she concludes, is the single most important factor accounting
for why some programs succeed and others do not, or, as is more likely the case, even get off the ground in any
meaningful sense.
Lin's analysis is anchored in the hyperrealism that experience with prisons breeds. She appreciates that
above all else, prisons are designed to exclude people from the free world and that this has significant debilitating
consequences for later integrating them back into the free world. However, she maintains that, once in prison,
all prison inmates must learn to "do their time." Among other things, this means finding ways to satisfy
their needs while in prison. Occasionally, she suggests, this leads some prisoners to strive to make their time
in prison meaningful in personal ways.
Page 596 begins here
This can include taking steps to develop skills that allow them to function more effectively in the free world.
In her conclusion she suggests that the task for policy makers concerned with rehabilitation is to find ways to
accomplish deliberately what now only happens from time to time by chance (p. 161), namely to locate programs in
larger settings that take the programming seriously, that want to make them work.
Her analysis of the two successful programs, in contrast to the three failures, begins this task. It is
a modest but still powerful conclusion. In a world filled with skeptics who hold as an article of faith that "nothing
works," documentation of even modest successes of two programs goes a long way towards undermining this conventional
wisdom. One hopes that this fine book will be a model for more studies to follow, and that in so doing it will
place (modestly crafted) rehabilitative programs within prisons higher on the agendas of prison officials and state
legislatures than they have been in recent years. One also hopes that this book will serve as a model for more
implementation studies of modest but important policies that deal with the messy problems of those in the most
problematic segments of society. In an era of retreat from social welfare programs and a diminution of idealism,
hers is a most welcome voice and vision. She teaches the value of institutional commitment to small modest steps.
This book hopes that the book will soon be out in paperback and read widely by public policy students and correctional
officials of all sorts.
REFERENCES:
Allen, Francis A. 1981. THE DECLINE OF THE REHABILATATIVE IDEAL: PENAL POLICY
AND SOCIAL PURPOSE. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Feeley, Malcolm M. and Edward L. Rubin. 1998. JUDICIAL POLICY MAKING AND THE
MODERN STATE: HOW THE COURTS REFORMED AMERICA'S PRISONS. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Martinson, Robert. 1974. "What Works? Questions and Answers about Prison
Reform." THE PUBLIC INTEREST 24: 25.
Copyright 2000 by the author.