ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a critical and wide-ranging historical overview of the major theories concerning the rehabilitating goal of criminal punishment and explores how some of these theories shaped prison practices and major prison models. Starting with Plato’s ideas and Christian thinkers’ contributions, the review first sets out chronologically organised snapshots that include the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ most prominent thinkers: the indeterminate sentencing ideas of Machonochie and Crofton, the American Pennsylvania and Auburn penitentiary systems, as well as Brockways’ ideas and their crystallisation in the Elmira reformatory. It then analyses four descriptive models of rehabilitation: penitentiary, therapeutic, social learning, and rights models, as well as two underlying evaluative ones: an anthropocentric and an authoritarian one. The chapter concludes by proposing the rights model as a superior practical and normative alternative that fully embodies humanistic values.
