Taking Rehabilitation Seriously

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The High Stakes of Stakeholder Engagement: A Plea for Careful Planning from Public Agenda

Alison Kadlec
Feb 1, 2012

This post was written for the 20 community colleges participating in Completion by Design, a five-year Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation initiative that aims to significantly increase completion rates for low-income students under 26. As a “National Assistance partner” for Completion by Design, Public Agenda provides direct assistance to the colleges to help them build capacity for solutions-oriented dialogue among faculty, staff and administration. Here, Public Agenda's Alison Kadlec discusses best practices for authentic internal stakeholder engagement. While the post is geared toward Completion by Design planning teams, the principles are useful for any authentic engagement process.

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You Can't Do It Alone: A New Guide to Creating Sustainable Change in Education Reform

Allison Rizzolo
Jan 24, 2012

Far too often, throughout our work in the education field, we've seen even the most earnest and promising ideas from experts and reformers for improving schools and ramping up student learning met with confusion, anxiety or even anger from teachers, parents, students or community members.

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Taking Rehabilitation Seriously

PERSPECTIVE IN BRIEF

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As a nation, we have relied increasingly on harsh sentences and incarceration as the punishment of choice for most offenders. What we have chosen to overlook is that most offenders emerge from prison more dangerous than they were before. While taking various measures to protect public safety, we have to get serious about rehabilitating criminals, and choosing alternatives to incarceration that prepare offenders to reenter society as law-abiding citizens. With youthful criminals especially, the justice system must emphasize rehabilitation.

PERSPECTIVE IN DETAIL

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What Should be Done?

Except where violent offenders pose a direct threat to the community, the goal of sentencing should be to help offenders get back on their feet, and to break the habits such as drug addiction that got them into trouble in the first place.

Keep criminals from being repeat offenders by doing everything possible to reintegrate them into the community.

Take seriously the task of preparing offenders to rejoin society and play a productive role in it.

Maintain a separate juvenile justice system which treats youthful offenders differently, considering what is in the youth's best interest.

Expand sentencing alternatives to provide alternatives to incarceration.

Arguments For This Approach

Most criminals eventually return to civilian life, so it's necessary to take their rehabilitation seriously.

If we don't take rehabilitation seriously, criminals are likely to become repeat felons.

The alternative of throwing young offenders in prison with hardened criminals is especially likely to produce what we should seek to avoid: chronic offenders who repeatedly resort to violence

Arguments Against This Approach

Those who commit violent acts no matter what their age should get punishment that's commensurate with the serious crimes they committed.

Rehabilitation is an unrealistic pipe dream. There is little evidence that anyone knows how to rehabilitate individuals who are in the habit of committing violent acts.

The present system, which often imposes lighter sentence for younger criminals, who can supposedly be rehabilitated, actually encourages the young to continue their criminal activity.

Many forms of alternative sentencing, which are justified on the grounds that they help to rehabilitate, don't adequately protect the public against violent offenders, many of whom pose a serious danger to their communities.