5 tories of Change 149
To be sure, that original optimism was never quite so simple: at
the heart of all therapeutic and punitive systems might have
remained something of the Calvinist bifurcation - the elect who
could be saved and helped, the doomed who were 'unamenable'.62
But the helping professions were strong enough to receive a collective
licence from the new faith in change, reform, treatment and
p'erfectibility .
This conceptual licence has now been questioned in the 'new
realism' of contemporary corrections. Treatment does not work,
the liberal state does not deliver the goods. So, it is back to
pessimistic theories such as sociobiology or else settle for horizons
so limited that failure rather than success must be assumed:
Heretofore, at the hean of the penal system or of parole and probation
was a 'success' model: we could reform the deviant. As an alternative I
believe that we could accomplish more by frankly adopting a 'failure'
model by recognising our inability to achieve such heady arid grandiose
goals as eliminating crime and remaking offenders. Let us accept failure
and pursue its, implications. 63
In the influential conservative version of the failure model
not only ?oes rehabilitation not work, but the whole enterpris~
of searchIng for root causes - psychological or social - is a
waste of time. Causes are too difficult to deal with and are
anyway, irrelevant to policy formation: 'ultimate causes canno~
be the object of policy efforts, precisely because being ultimate
they cannot be changed.'64 For Wilson and other conservatives
!TYing to. find out why people commit crime is futile: the poin~
IS to. deSIgn a system of deterrence which will work, without
knOWIng what factors would promote crime in the absence of
deterrence.
This does not mean that the conservative model rules out
the idea of treatment as such.65 Some bifurcatory sorting must
be done. The 'amenables' (young, anxious, verbal, intelligent and
neurotic) can remain on the soft, counselling-type programmes.
The non-amenables (the power-oriented psychopaths who foul up
all the evaluation studies) must be subject to traditional custody
or else strict surveillance and supervision in the community.
'Tre~tment' means not mind-therapy but any planned inter~
e~t1on, and becomes th~ sa.me as special deterrence: 'behaviourally,
It IS not clear that a CrimInal can tell the difference between rehabilitation
and special deterrence if each involves a comparable
degree of restriction. '66