The Historical Origins and Evolution of Rehabilitative Punishment

The notion of rehabilitative punishment has changed over time, variously informed by political contexts, prevailing ideas, and institutional frameworks. Enlightenment utilitarian reformers did not prioritize reformation of the offender. The penitentiary movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries mainly concerned new prison regimes that did not, however, question the retributive and deterrent rationales of punishment. The nineteenth century was characterized by significant albeit isolated experiments in prison regimes premised on offenders’ reintegration and by a theoretical debate on the consistency of reeducative goals and methods with penal liberalism. With the rise of criminological reformism between the 1870s and the 1920s, the rehabilitative principle became the basis for theoretical rethinking of the rationale of punishment and the justifications of structural sentencing reforms. Paradoxically, the growing importance of alternatives to imprisonment and reformative treatment was always associated, in discourse and in practice, with incapacitation. This inherent contradiction characterizes the rehabilitative ideal to the present day. Recently, even more than the constitutionalization of rehabilitation in some countries and its recognition by international law authorities, the jurisprudence of supranational courts seems to open new prospects for recognition of resocialization as a right of the offender.