ABSTRACT
The last large-scale survey and analysis of treatments, undertaken by a panel of the National Academy of Sciences, is over a decade old. Since then there has been continued experimentation, and successes have been reported. Some treatment advocates, such as Paul Gendreau and Robert Ross, have suggested that such findings show that rehabilitation has been "revivified". Rehabilitationism offers a more attractive reason — a crime-preventive one — for decent penal policies. Some new rehabilitationists' rejection of other models, such as desert, is based on a "socially critical" perspective: how the rationale is likely to be implemented in a society characterized by race, class, and gender inequalities. One possibility would be to give proportionality a limiting role: the seriousness of the criminal conduct would set upper and lower bounds on the quantum of punishment—within which rehabilitation could be invoked to fix the sentence.
