Interpretación de la opinión de los estudiantes sobre la aplicación de

With the increasing the change in corrections interventions across the USA and around the world, it became apparent that a vast amount of literature regarding corrections to the mid 1960’s had amassed without concise evaluation of efficacy. There was a dearth of evidence

22 implemented under the therapeutic milieu (Martinson, 1974a; 1974b). By 1966, it was deemed an answer was required to the ever asked question – what can we do to rehabilitate offenders? Martinson and his colleagues were commissioned by the New York state Governor in 1966 to review the literature and deliver a report detailing the known strategies at the time which had had an appreciable effect on offending (Martinson, 1974b). By the time Martinson’s commissioned report was ready to be tabled in 1970, the Government had changed their mind about the ‘value’ of publicly releasing the report (Martinson, 1974b).

Martinson was prevented from publishing the findings through governmental channels, or independently through peer reviewed journals. His report reflected that then current policy and procedure were unfounded and ineffective in their task (Martinson, 1974a). He concluded that much of the ‘therapeutic’ interventions of the time, while grounded in altruistic intention, did not produce an appreciable change in offender recidivism (Martinson, 1974b). Martinson

postulated that the publication prohibition resulted from fear of detrimental effects of his findings on current policy and procedure (Martinson, 1974b). The thwarted findings eventually came to light only when subpoenaed for use in the Bronx court in relation to another matter. At which point the State had no choice but to release the work for publication (Martinson, 1974b). By the time of the release of their report, the narrative ‘meta’ analysis was long overdue.

Unfortunately for the field of corrections, the releasing of these results some eight years after they were commissioned, onto a government and population disillusioned by an increasing crime rate and the increased cost of corrections, had a negative effect (Ward & Maruna, 2007).

Presenting a call for greater debate and hypothesis testing around the then use of correctional treatment, Martinson’s thesis became a spring-board for others to argue the mythical nature of rehabilitation and legitimised what was to become in the 1980’s the ‘mean season of corrections’ (Cullen & Gendreau, 2001; Petersilia, 1998).

Given the swift academic response to his work (e.g., Palmer, 1975), Martinson released a brief secondary paper to address what he termed “persistent misinterpretations” (Martinson, 1976, p. 181). Martinson stated the then current available treatments made no addition to the

23 deterrent effect of incarceration. He summarised that while the available evidence was not

encouraging, available therapeutic interventions did no worse than standard imprisonment practises. In addressing queries around the abolishment of therapeutic intervention in the

corrections setting, Martinson likened this to methods of reducing idleness and advised others to “cease demanding from our criminal justice networks what they are unable to accomplish” (Martinson, 1974a, p. 49). Finally in regard to the ‘myth’ of rehabilitation, Martinson promoted crime deterrence. This endorsement was offered in the absence of evidence supporting its efficacy in producing change. Despite his swift attempts to dilute his statements, the conclusions made by others of Martinson’s findings were resounding: no therapeutic methods of

intervention, or community-based sanctions, will have an effect in reducing re-offending (Brody, 1976; Lipton, Martinson, & Wilks, 1975; Whitehead & Lab, 1989). Furthermore, any research in this vein would support these findings (Cullen & Gendreau, 2001)

Martinson was among few who described this Nothing Works view formally; nonetheless this opinion went on to frame much of corrections practice over the subsequent twenty years (e.g., Pitts, 1992; Wilson, 1975). Among those commentaries or studies that added to the Nothing Works movement, were Martinson’s co-investigator Lipton and his stateside colleagues (1975) and Brody (1976) from across the Atlantic. Consistent with Martinson’s original commentary (1974), these separate studies agreed that of the studies available whose data could be considered indicative of reality, no single intervention was found to work across settings, or contexts. As has been agreed by numerous scholars since, a more appropriate statement at the time would have been to comment on the lack of conclusions that could be made on the then available literature given failings in study design (e.g., Palmer, 1975). In the absence of such statements, and in the socio-political context of the time, the Nothing Works doctrine began to flourish in earnest by the end of the 1970’s.

An example of this blossoming of Nothing Works, Bottoms and McWilliams (1979) used what they termed the “collapse of treatment” (p. 159) to provide rationale for their own theory. Presenting a reconceptualised model of the probation model, the pair stated that any aims to

24 attempt to reform prisoners with treatment were ineffective and an inappropriate use of tax payer funds. Identifying Martinson’s work (as presented in Lipton et al., 1975) as one among few who have “responsibly reviewed the relevant literature” (p. 160), Bottoms and McWilliams concluded that treatment to reduce recidivism was a lost cause (Croft, 1978; Bottoms & McWilliams, 1979). Other authors were to affirm Martinson’s claims regarding the inability of the justice system to rehabilitate over the following twenty years. Of these commentators, the writing of John Pitts (1992) about the probation system and its alleged lack of efficacy is particularly notable. Indeed, Pitts claimed that by 1992 no rational or empirically based theory had been developed (Pitts, 1992), and simply ignored the reality of there being a sizeable body of theoretical and empirical research to the contrary (e.g., Andrews, 1989; Andrews & Wormith, 1989; Cullen & Gilbert, 1982; Gendreau & Ross, 1979; 1987; Gottschalk, Davidson, Mayer, & Gensheimer, 1987; Izzo & Ross, 1990; Lattimore & Witte, 1985; Martinson, 1979). In effect, Pitts and others before him, (and fewer after him: Farabee, 2005) contended that rehabilitation was as baseless as the practices that had been eviscerated by Martinson in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and that attempts at using treatment to enact rehabilitation were imprudent. Unfortunately, as has been accepted more widely with hindsight, the narrow focus of the Nothing Works scholars was remarkably opaque. The ability of this body of research to produce results indicating Nothing Works, in the absence of a sound empirical base, was remarkable.