ABSTRACT
For the past 20 years, the juvenile justice system in the United States has been the subject of the most intensive policy debates in its history. These debates were the result of a number of studies conducted during the 1970s that concluded that most correctional rehabilitation programs had little impact on the offender's postrelease behavior. The most infamous of these studies was the Lipton, Martinson, and Wilks (1975) report. After examining 231 evaluation studies of correctional treatment programs, the authors concluded, “With few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have no appreciable effect on recidivism” (p. 25).
