Gloomy predictions about the failure of rehabilitation seem nothing new, but for a major, nationally known and respected think tank like the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research to set on that course has marked a new development.
The Manhattan Institute, located across the street from New York City’s Grand Central Station, once commented chiefly on economic issues such as budget deficits, unfunded pensions, and health care, while papers on legal issues had focused on commercial issues like tort reform. Always conservative, the nonprofit has lately engaged in causes supportive of a Trump agenda and the new direction has included criminal justice reform.
“The Manhattan Institute … has become a major intellectual force for the American right, thanks to the influence of hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer and other wealthy donors. The Institute has poured nearly $200 million into promoting its own vision for Trump’s America, with a focus on conservative beliefs around diversity. Republican statehouses across the country are adopting laws drafted by the institute, which has also gained influence in areas such as taxes, education, and law enforcement. Critics argue that these policies could set back progress towards a more just society,” said Bloomberg News.
The Institute’s report “Why ‘Rehabilitating’ Repeat Criminal Offenders Often Fails,” published in February, made many bold claims. Co-authored by Matt Logan, Associate Professor at the School of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Texas State University, and John Paul Wright, Professor at the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati, the paper listed the Institute’s Hannah E. Meyers as the third contributor.
Meyers, holder of the title Director of Policing & Public Safety and Fellow, has previously written several papers centered on race-related police misconduct in which she defended the police. The National Review said she wrote, “Accusations of monolithic police racism in the U.S. are wrong and distracting” and “The distorted fears by African Americans of the police could lead to hesitancy to call for police assistance.”
The report grounded its message in a Hegelian trio of premises. Although the sources for the trio produced highly sensationalistic text, their basis amounted to two books from the late 1990s and two academic papers from 2018, one about academic motivation in teacher-student relationships.
The first premise made a leap of faith from vague 2018 Bureau of Justice Statistics numbers, saying, “Those who commit crimes today will be those who commit crimes tomorrow, and they will be the same people who commit crimes until they are incapacitated by age, infirmity, imprisonment, or death.”
It added the rather broad statement that criminals “share characteristics including hyperaggression, poor self-control, bad decision-making skills, disdain for conventions such as employment and education, social and economic parasitism, entitled attitudes, and manipulative behavior,” quoted from Richard T. Wright and Scott H. Decker’s 1997 book “Armed Robbers in Action: Stickups and Street Culture.”
The book’s characterization of repeat offenders concluded with criminals seeing “nothing wrong or immoral with their impolite and dangerous behavior. As several qualitative studies of active offenders demonstrate, many report experiencing enjoyment at terrorizing, maiming, and killing others.”
The second premise came from two 2018 academic papers. “Criminals have friends and family who are also criminals, normalizing these traits,” a quotation from Thomas J. Mowen and John H. Boman IV, and a quotation from Frontiers in Education from December 2018: “Criminal behaviors are habituated and manifest from early callous and unemotional traits in childhood that seamlessly unfold into antisocial personality throughout adulthood.”
The report’s third and final premise stated, “Criminals represent a class of people who are very different from the rest of society. They do not share conventional means, aspirations, and moral values; indeed, they see crime as an important element to their self-identity. Crime earns them status and respect on the street, empowers them to exert influence over others, and enables them to live recklessly nihilistic lives.”
The above quotations led the trio of authors to conclude, “Criminals are more likely to resist than to earnestly embrace behavioral change. This is why rehabilitation programs characterized by high fidelity and dosage fail more often than not—and when they work, why they do so only in a limited fashion.”
A brief counter-argument admitted “some high-rate criminal offenders change their lives,” but that argument ended with the warning that “we cannot predict who will terminate their criminal career or when.” Such logic relied on the trope that no one could predict the future, leading the reader to err on the side of caution.
The report continued its counterargument, saying, “Some desisters have a deeply religious conversion; others burn out after spending years in and out of jail and prison and suffering the deprivations of a life of crime. Some get a job they value or a spouse they wish to keep.” It also used that counter-argument to reinforce the idea that “few, if any, report ending their criminal career because of a correctional rehabilitation program. The hard reality is that a lifestyle of criminal behavior, backed by a strong self-identity reinforced by decades of poor behavioral choices, is very difficult to change.”
In short, two passages from books from the late 1990s and two short academic
works proved the report’s claim of criminals as humans of reduced worth. Such meager argumentative support also supported the authors’ idea that rehabilitation seemed unlikely to change behavior, and that most criminals merited no rehabilitation.
The report then presented its evidence with a poster child for incorrigibility: Darrell Brooks. After 16 arrests from 1999 to 2016, “Brooks drove his red SUV into a 2021 Christmas parade route in Waukesha, Wis., and subsequently received six consecutive life sentences, plus an additional 700 years in prison, after a jury found him guilty of all 76 charges levied against him.” For the Manhattan Institute, a single person apparently substantiated all their points.
The Institute came up with a set of four recommendations that would evaluate rehabilitative programs. The first said to study rehabilitative programs in blind randomized controlled trials, an already commonly used method employed in social science research.
The Institute apparently worried about ethics in such studies: “Under no circumstances should program designers, staff, or those with financial or career interests be allowed to evaluate their own programs.” As evidence of such ethics violations, the authors resorted to a study about antidepressants that had nothing to do with prison rehabilitation.
The report said inflated estimates, quasi-experimental research designs, and statistical noise “explain why the vast majority of evaluative studies on rehabilitation are completely at odds with what is known about the immutability of antisocial behavior.”
The first recommendation took swipes at rehabilitation: “Sentencing conferences (or ‘circles’) and restitution programs ‘sound good.’ What would lead us to expect that these kinds of interventions are powerful enough to change deep-seated criminal impulses developed over 15 or 20 or 25 years? Do we really think that a couple of hours at a sentencing conference—even an emotional meeting with the victim—are capable of transforming such offenders?”
The second recommendation amounted to a list of complaints about faulty elements in research: “‘Rehabilitation’ doesn’t mean the termination of offending behavior or even the embrace of other pro-social roles in its current usage.”
The third recommendation offered advice such as, “programs might work at one location but not another,” and “Jurisdictions have different needs, different levels of buy-in and talent, and different problems.”
The final recommendation warned about rehabilitation advocates with an agenda rooted in ideology rather than science.
The report’s conclusion advocated a scientific ethos rooted in objectivity and realistic expectations and a return to 1970sera research on rehabilitation in the same paragraph. It ended with, “We suggest reaffirming a commitment to scholarly humility over hubris.”
