1970's Treatment Model

Despite the criticisms levelled at them in the 1970s, "treatment approaches" to offending behaviour remain worth pursuing today. Offer a critical assessment of this claim.

This essay is going to give reasons why treatment approaches to crime are still valuable today despite the criticisms originated during the 1970s, especially after Martinson’s “Nothing works” report (1974). Drawing from Positivism and its related theories of crime, this essay is going to explain how treatment models in the 1970s worked and how they differ from the punitive system we have today, that is based on Classical theories (of crime). Furthermore, this essay is going to illustrate two different ideologies on which treatment models are built, Behaviourism and Psychoanalysis,

This concept is known as criminal atavism (Lombroso, 1896) and had different application in real-life scenarios, including some very extreme ones such as the Eugenic movement, an attempt to control and improve evolution with the application of methods that have often been judged immoral and inhuman. These included the forced sterilisation of those who were considered “unfit” to reproduce. From a Criminal Justice point of view, Lombroso’s theories had the effect of allowing Preventive Detention for those who presented signs of atavism. These biological theories of crime soon evolve into psychological approaches to crime. Now the focus is no longer on the body, but on the mind (and the brain) of the criminal. The medico-psychological part of these theories, in particular, was very considered until after the Second World War (1939-1945) and imported a wide range of medical terms (e.g. treatment, diagnosis, rehabilitation and so on) into criminology. Applications of these theories include attempts to identify regions of the

We have already talked about the origins of psychoanalysis and its innovative approach to crime. The concept of the unconscious, in fact, has the power to approach and explain crime in a totally new way. This essay is now going to talk about the solutions proposed to the issue of criminality. Psychoanalytical treatment models are all based on the assumption that the offender has emotional troubles that can be faced through talking cures. This originates in Freud’s ideas (Freud 1963, 116-150). Talking therapies are the main mean of rehabilitation. It is still possible to find applications of this treatment models in a really little number of prisons and in a prevalently experimental form. A typical example of this is the Grendon Prison: this is a pretty unusual prison in Buckinghamshire that works with major criminals who are often facing very long sentences. The approach to criminality here is unconventional for the highly punitive penal system we are used to see and, as Chris McLaughlin (2010) points out in his article, this regime would be seen “as the system going soft” by what he calls “the hang-’em-and-flog-’em brigade” (precise reference). However, this same prison is described by some of its inmates themselves as the hardest they have endured inside. This prison was opened in 1962 as an experimental psychiatric community aimed to treat anti-social prisoners. Today Grendon has