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54 Prison J. 2 (1974)

handle is hein.journals/prsjrnl54 and id is 1 raw text is: Editorial THE END OF AN ERA Willard Gaylin, in his penetrating book, Partial lustice, has summed up the state of sentencing disparities in the United States today. In commenting on the case of a conservative judge who defends his incon- sistency in a case where he felt that one person was less culpable in terms of involvement and intent, Gaylin says, Here we see the ultimate confusion of a system of public justice that seems to be coming apart: the con- servative defends the humanistic tradition of individua- lized justice, while his liberal counterpart is determined to categorize defendants into groups. The inconsistency is characteristic of a system near bankruptcy, the bankruptcy referred to here being not of the courts, but of the concept of criminal justice. Such confusion is in- evitable in a society approaching the end of one era with no vision of the one to follow. The rehabilitative mod- el, the therapeutic model, is rejected by those who creat- ed it. It is defended finally only by the conservative, who in his faith and adherence to tradition generally has now latched onto a liberal ideal he might have rejected on first introduction, but which has gained legitimacy by its fifty years of survival. * Along these lines, we recently heard an administrator of a correctional system remark, It is pretty hard to go on working in a system when you know from solid research statistics that if we incarcerate someone, he is most likely to recidivate; if we put him on probation, he is less likely to recidivate; and he is least likely to commit another crime if we do noth- ing at all! We are indeed at the end of an era. Thoughtful administrators and observers of correctional systems are rejecting the rehabilitative ideal; and researchers like Robert Martinson are laying to rest our former optimism concerning the effectiveness of treatment. But having abandoned one concept of criminal justice, where are we to go from here? Dr. Gaylin is correct that there is little thought, and no concensus in terms of a vision of what is to follow. Yet we must try. Indeed, perhaps the full realization that the past has failed, at least in practice, and probably often in theory as well, will free us to think the unthinkable, to probe for the untried, and hopefully to discover the un- discovered. To do this, we have some guidelines, if not yet a new and cohesive system to offer. First, we can put away the euphemisms about rehabilitation and return to a concept of justice that has often been tragically neglected * Partial Justice: A Study ol Bias in Sentencing, by Willard Gaylin, M.D., Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1974 (Used with permission).

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