ABSTRACT
Forty years ago, Francis T. “Frank” Cullen, alongside Karen E. Gilbert, wrote what would become one of the great books in criminal justice, Reaffirming Rehabilitation. In this seminal piece, Frank warned about the dangers of abandoning the rehabilitative ideal and embracing a correctional system based on punishment and determinate sentences. However, Frank did not stop with a simple warning. Instead, he would devote much of his scholarly life to empirically resisting a mean season of corrections, providing evidence of the effectiveness of rehabilitation as a guiding correctional philosophy. To honor this work, this chapter highlights the core tenets of this now-classic book and Frank’s influence in changing the correctional tide from “nothing works” to “what works.” The chapter concludes with how the legacy of Reaffirming Rehabilitation will live on not only in the scholarship it inspires but also in the people that Frank has mentored during his long career.
