What rehabilitation aims to do

1. Rehabilitation means working with an offender to reduce criminal and anti-social behaviour by dealing with what caused it.
2. It has a second aim as well, which is increasing pro-social behaviour.
3. Pro-social behaviour is anything that helps or benefits other people, such as holding down a job, finishing a course or volunteering.
4. Both aims count, so an offender who stops offending and does nothing more has met only half of it.
5. The two approaches to know are restorative justice and the use of positive role models.

Restorative justice and positive role models

1. Restorative justice: the offender meets the victim, or makes amends to them, in a process run by a trained facilitator.
   1. The victim describes what the offence did to them, and the offender has to sit and listen to it.
   2. Hearing it face to face makes the harm concrete, which builds empathy the offender did not have before.
   3. The offender then takes responsibility, usually by apologising or by repairing what they damaged.
   4. An offender who has heard the harm described finds it harder to excuse doing the same thing again.
   5. The victim gains too, because they get answers and an apology.
2. Positive role models: giving the offender someone lawful to watch and copy.
   1. Social learning theory says criminal behaviour is picked up by watching models, so pro-social behaviour can be picked up the same way.
   2. The models used are mentors, youth workers, prison education staff and people who have stopped offending themselves.
   3. The offender identifies with a model who has something in common with them, which makes imitation more likely.
   4. Seeing that model rewarded with work, respect or a stable home is vicarious reinforcement of the lawful choice.
   5. Repeated often enough, the new behaviour is internalised, so it carries on once the mentor has gone.

Limitations of each approach

1. Restorative justice is unsuitable for some offences, and no victim should ever be pressured into meeting the person who harmed them.
2. It needs the victim to agree to take part, so the whole option disappears if they say no.
3. A conference leaves the debts, the estate and the friends they go back to exactly as they were.
4. One mentor can be outweighed by all the anti-social models filling the rest of a person's week.
5. Role modelling only works where the offender identifies with the model, so a mentor from a very different background may be ignored.

Evaluating rehabilitation

1. Rehabilitation is measured by recidivism, meaning how many people go on to reoffend afterwards.
2. Strength: it goes after the causes of offending, so it can cut recidivism further than a penalty on its own.
3. Strength: it has psychology behind it, because the same learning that produced the offending is used to undo it.
4. Strength: restorative justice gives the victim something back, which a prison sentence rarely does.
5. Weakness: success depends on the offender wanting to change, so results vary enormously between individuals.
6. Weakness: it needs time, trained staff and funding, so it costs more up front than issuing a fine.
7. Weakness: plenty of people see it as soft on offenders, which makes it hard to expand.

Turning this into marks

1. When both aims of rehabilitation are asked for, give cutting offending and raising pro-social behaviour as two separate points, because one of them on its own is half an answer.
2. Name the processes at work, empathy and responsibility for restorative justice or identification and vicarious reinforcement for role models, because writing that the scheme helps the offender does not secure the knowledge mark.
3. The mark most often lost is describing deterrence instead of rehabilitation, so a threatened cost rather than a change in the person.