Reform in the Making

Is it time to give up on rehabiliting criminals? Record numbers of Americans are going to prision, and most of them will eventually return to society with a high chance of being repaet offenders. But a decision to abandon rehabilitation programmes would be premature warns Ann Chih Lin, who finds that little attention has been given to how these programmes are actually implemented and why they tend to fail. Here, she not only supplies much-needed information on the process of programme implementation but she also considers its social context - the daily realities faced by prison staff and inmates. By offering an in-depth look at common rehabilitation programmes currently in operation - education, job training and drug treatment - and examining how they are used of misused, Lin offers a practical approach to understanding their high failure rate and how the situation could be improved.