Meta-analysis and the rehabilitation of punishment

Do we know what works in the way of rehabilitative treatment in corrections? Not yet. Has the old nothing works literature been invalidated by new reviews of research claiming to show, through meta-analysis, that treatment really does work, at least when it is appropriate? Not likely. Would production of this knowledge enhance the ability of prison officials to do their job? Not ever. Their job, and their highest duty, is to administer justice, not treatment. Individualized treatment muddles the message of punishment, making it less principled and not necessarily more humane. A confinement model of imprisonment is proposed, which rejects rehabilitation as an official goal and yet allows for programs of work, education, and other activities within the mission of a prison. The correctional rehabilitation ethic is a child of this century, born with the rise of Progressive ideology and reform in the early decades, growing strong with the development of social science in the thirties and forties, reaching maturity in the fifties when the medical model was at its peak, suffering a mid-life crisis and a loss of faith in the sixties and seventies, and essentially gone and forgotten by the eighties. As we enter the nineties, the rehabilitative ideal is showing signs of revival as some researchers, employing a new technology called meta-analysis, believe they have detected life in the old body still. Were the rumors of the death of rehabilitation premature? Or is it time to give rehabilitation a decent burial and to consider a