The Social Scientist and Rehabilitative Crime Policy

Social scientists are in a quandary about crime policy. On the one hand, the tools of their discipline incline them naturally toward a search for the causes of differences in delinquent behavior, an inclination which appears to be supportive of the potential for rehabilitative components to crime policy. Both the premise of determinism and the methodology of differentiation are intellectually compatible with the prospects for rehabilitation, because both are requisites for a crime control strategy that seeks the impact of purposeful changes in the lives or attitudes of delinquents on subsequent behavior. On the other hand, social scientists are being confronted with a number of arguments that question the utility for social policy of adherence to these assumptions. The validity of some of these arguments is explored briefly in this article. They are found to suffer from an erroneous conception of the logic of determinism, an underdevelopment of the notion of deterrence, or an artifactual conception of the requisites for rehabilitation.