DOING GOOD AND DOING JUSTICE
There have recently been some startling changes of tactics, alliances
and battlefields, but the basic conflicts in the politics of crime
control are still expressed in traditional terms: soft versus hard,
liberal versus conservative, treatment versus punishment or, more
recently (and in many ways, more accurately), 'doing good' versus
'doing justice'. I do not intend to review here the massive current
literature on this subject. The policy question I want to suggest is
more limited: 1 ust what sort of space for doing good and doing
justice might actually be offered by emerging social-control systems?
But before posing this question, some sense of the wider
debate is needed.
In crime-control politics over the last few decades, the battle
over doing good has been fought in two main are.a~: '~rst, the
somewhat restricted matter of the place of rehabilItation programmes
in settings such as prisons and, second, the much wider
issue of the legitimacy of rehabilitation as a primary aim of pu?~shment.
What has variously been termed the 'retreat from rehabIlitation'
the 'decline of the rehabilitative ideal' or the 'downfall of
the therapeutic empire' over this period, has already been extensively
described. 10 In chapter 4 I reviewe~ some of the reas';lDs !or
this move, which of course overlapped With the destructurmg Impulse
itself. These included distrust of the unchecked discretionary
powers awarded to state officials, considerations of civil liberties,
criticism of treatment as a mask for hypocrisy and coercion, and
the perception that treatment was, anyway, not working.
Conservatives - so the story goes on - in the face of rising
crime rates, general threats to order and traditional authority and
then the apparent evidence that liberal solutions were played out,
reaffirmed their traditional goals of deterrence, incapacitation and
retribution by imposinJ;: harsh punishments. The liberal left
'capitulated', thinking that if the state could not be trusted to do
good and if doing good anyway had ambiguous results, then we