7 Developments in the Twentieth Century

Around the turn of the Century a new concern arose concerning the treatment of females and children. Opening in 1894, New York’s Western House of Refuge at Albion was designed to correct the behavior of errant young women (Rafter, 1985). Unlike Elmira, Albion and other female reformatories patterned after it focused on training young women accused of promiscuity and other non-lady-like behaviors in their “proper” roles. The program promised to deliver them “from sexual autonomy to propriety” and “sauciness to subservience” through a domestic sciences department. They would be molded by staff and a board of upper middle-class women relying on the controls of sequestration, removal of their children, sterilization, and revocation.

The benevolence and philanthropic ideals of Progressive Movement would extend to children as well. The first Juvenile Court system began operation in Cook County (Chicago), Illinois in 1899 with a mandate to “save” poor, immigrant children from the harmful effects of urban environment. As with the female reformatory movement, the progressives believed that behavior could most effectively be changed with a system that allowed a maximum amount of discretion with the fewest procedural impediments. Their benevolence and paternalistic concern would be implemented through informal procedures allowing subjects only modest legal protections as a matter of conscience and convenience (Rothman, 2017).

The next major wave of corrections reform was known as the rehabilitation model, which achieved momentum during the 1930s. This era was marked by public favor with psychology and other social and behavioral sciences. Ideas of punishment gave way to ideas of treatment, and optimistic reformers began attempts to rectify social and intellectual deficiencies that were the proximate causes of criminal activity. This was essentially a medical model in which criminality was a sort of disease that could be cured. This model held sway until the 1970s when rising crime rates and a changing prison population undermined public confidence.

After the belief that “nothing works” became popular, the crime control model became the dominant paradigm of corrections in the United States. The model attacked the rehabilitative model as being “soft on crime.” “Get tough” policies became the norm throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and lengthy prison sentences became common. The aftermath of this has been a dramatic increase in prison populations and a corresponding increase in corrections expenditures. Those expenditures have reached the point that many states can no longer sustain their departments of Correction. The pendulum seems to be swinging back toward a rehabilitative model, with an emphasis on community corrections. While the community model has existed parallel to the crime control model for many years, it seems to be growing in prominence.