British Journal of Criminology Advance Access originally published online on April 18, 2006
British Journal of Criminology 2006 46(5):822-836; doi:10.1093/bjc/azl014
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The British Journal of Criminology 46:822-836 (2006)
© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD).All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Rehabilitation and Repression
Reassessing their Ideological Embeddedness
* Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Erasmus University, PO Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Mascini{at}fsw.eur.nl.
For over a century, scholars and practitioners have assumed rehabilitation stands as the progressive opposite of repression. Elaborating on previous warnings and anomalous findings, a representative survey of the Dutch population (N = 1,892) points out that this received view is flawed. When measured separately, no significant correlation exists between support for rehabilitation and support for repression, rehabilitation is equally popular among the constituencies of conservative and progressive political parties, and no negative relationship exists between rehabilitation and authoritarianism. Decriminalization rather than rehabilitation proves to constitute the progressive converse of repression. By way of conclusion, we discuss the remarkable persistence of the received view reassessed in this paper, even in the face of convincing earlier contradictory evidence.