Vol. 10 No. 11 (November 2000) pp. 592-596.

REFORM IN THE MAKING: THE IMPLEMENTATION OF SOCIAL POLICY IN PRISON by Ann Chih Lin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 213 pp. Cloth $39.50.

Reviewed by Malcolm M. Feeley, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, School of Law, University of California, Berkeley.

Twenty-five years ago Robert Martinson published his famous article in PUBLIC INTEREST, "What Works?" (1974). The article reported on a meta-
analysis of hundreds of studies of the effects of rehabilitation programs. The title of the article succinctly captured Martinson's concerns and foretells his conclusion that "nothing works." This article came to symbolize the end of an era. Although Martinson later came to modify his position (claiming that everything works a little bit), his article became a symbol for those frustrated with or opposed to the rehabilitative ideal for any of a number of reasons. Along with Francis Allen's THE DECLINE OF THE REHABILITATIVE IDEAL (1981), it came to be regarded as elegies for the dead ideal. However, a funny thing happened after the funeral. Like Mark Twain's famous quip, the announcement of its death was premature. As Francis Cullen and his colleagues, as well as this author and others, have pointed out from time to time over the past twenty years, a great many prison officials have never acknowledged the demise of the rehabilitative ideal. Indeed as my
colleague Edward Rubin and I have shown in our book, JUDICIAL POLICY MAKING AND THE MODERN STATE: HOW THE COURTS REFORMED AMERICA'S PRISONS (1998), one of the core organizing ideas that fueled the rapid-fire embrace of prison conditions issues by the federal judiciary was the idea of prisoner rehabilitation.

In short, the idea of rehabilitation is alive, although it has led a low-profile existence in recent years. Given the great public pronouncements about its demise, how can this be? Put simply the answer is that it is difficult for anyone who reflects seriously upon the nature and daily operations of modern prisons in a liberal democratic society to think that the people who are there temporarily should as a matter of policy be returned to society unchanged or worse off than when they went in. There is a deep and natural impulse to say that the conditions and experience there should provide some opportunities for improvement. At least this is what the generally conservative, white, male and, often, Republican federal trial court judges thought when they intervened to challenge conditions in prisons
in virtually every correctional system in the United States. The Thirteenth Amendment notwithstanding, prison inmates were not, they asserted, "slaves of the state" whose personhood could be ignored with impunity. Rather, they are individuals with (admittedly limited) rights, and among them are some prospects for opportunities to better themselves. One of the reasons that the prison conditions rulings did not generate deep and widespread general opposition from correctional leaders and politicians

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(though there were pockets of fierce resistance by authorities), is that thoughtful correctional leaders generally agreed with the aspiration of rehabilitation. In fact the judges took their cues from correctional leaders, so much so that court rulings appear at times to be drawn directly from standards first promoted and published by American Correctional Association or from testimony given by leading correctional experts, who as often as not were called by the defense and not prisoner-complainants. This does not mean that judges and correctional officials were social workers who sought to treat the "social disease" of sick and misguided
inmates.

Although they embraced (and embrace) a notion of rehabilitation, it might be thought of as rehabilitation with a lower case and not an upper case "r." It was and is generally a minimalist understanding of the idea. However, it was (and remains) firmly ensconced in the thinking of many of those involved in corrections. Why? There are several reasons. First, some sort of programming for improvement is good for prison morale and control purposes. Letting prisoners know that if they successfully complete a course, hold a job, learn a skill, participate in a group activity or the like, they might improve their classification ratings and be shifted to a
setting with more liberties, is smart prison administration. It is a tasty carrot. However, at the same time, it can help inmates develop skills they lack. Second, rehabilitation provides officials with a role morality, or sense of moral mission. In visits to many prisons and discussions with dozens of wardens, I have met very few who view or want to view their jobs solely as warehouse managers. They are in charge of men and women who as a group have a huge deficit of social skills that most of us take for granted, the ability to read a want ad, figure simple sums, speak English, and who have obvious and overwhelming problems with self-esteem and controlling anger. One does not need to be a John Howard or a Jane Addams to support prison programming that will address these problems or to impose them as
conditions of probation. The obvious and wide-spread impulse of correctional leaders is to say, "we have they folks here, and while they are here they should have some opportunities to help themselves." If nothing else, this aspiration adds an element of nobility to an otherwise desultory job that could be characterized as managing people like cattle. So, for these and still other reasons throughout the period following the well-publicized death of rehabilitation, sentiments for rehabilitation were maintained and some such programming was continued. If it did not flourish, it at least survived.

Today we are witnessing a renewal of interest in rehabilitation and associated activities. At times it is as if the idea has been resurrected. Even conservatives are jumping onboard. For instance John DiIulio, sometimes (though incorrectly) thought of as a hard-line "lock 'em up and throw away the key" kind of guy, has left the comforts of Princeton for life in West Philadelphia, to help those devastated by life in the inner-city and by crime to try to improve their lot by learning to strengthen family and church ties, improving educational and vocational opportunities, and the like. Also, every city, even in the most conservative regions of the country claims that they have or need to have a "drug court" which takes a treatment-oriented (and less-expensive), rather than purely punitive, response to drugs.

Against this background, Ann Chih Lin's fine book, REFORM IN THE MAKING, is a welcome addition to the


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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

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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.


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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.