Nothing Works Revisited: Deconstructing Farabee'sRethinking Rehabilitation

In Rethinking Rehabilitation, Farabee claims that offender treatment is a failed enterprise and instead proposes a correctional approach that emphasizes deterrence through intensive supervision, electronic monitoring, and indeterminate parole sentences. We argue that this neo-Martinson attack on rehabilitation, which has the potential to shape public policy discourse, needs to be deconstructed. Although Farabee's critique has merits—especially about the limited effectiveness of many current prison programs—his analysis ignores research both favorable to offender treatment and unfavorable to his proposed policy agenda. In this context, his advice to choose a correctional future that is punitive and devoid of rehabilitation would be a mistake.