ABSTRACT
Chapters 10 and 11 propel the narrative into the 1960s, often considered the decade in which the rehabilitative ideal reached its zenith. In fact, the evidence hardly sustains such a view. Chapter 10 begins with the issue of corporal punishment, and particularly the heavy-handed prompts in the 1950s of Lord Chief Justice Goddard and his successor, Lord Parker, to reintroduce what they insisted was a deterrent penalty. The government finally asked the Advisory Council on the Treatment of Offenders to review the evidence, the Council coming out strongly against the reintroduction of corporal punishment as a judicial penalty. This prefaced the debates on the Criminal Justice Bill 1961, where the attempt to bring back corporal punishment quickly petered out. The 1961 bill was in line with the rehabilitative ethos, in that it created an indeterminate sentence of custodial training for young adults between 17 and 21, with the prison commissioners and not the court deciding how long an offender remained in custody. At first, the judiciary accepted this restriction on their sentencing discretion, but later the worm turned and they began to chafe under the restriction. Likewise, the judiciary, via the Court of Criminal Appeal, laid down its own rules for the use of corrective training and preventive detention, the two measures in the 1948 Criminal Justice Act to deal with persistent offending, rules that led to fewer such sentences, and to the Advisory Council’s recommendation to abandon both measures.
