Glueck's Philosophy Of Corrections

According to Morris & Rothman (1995), the guiding philosophy underlying correctional policies and practices in the early twentieth century was that a criminal is considered mentally ill and needs to be cured. Before the Progressive Movement after World War II, there were efforts made to change how the correctional policies and procedures were played out. Sadly, most often the actual design of a prison was based off of budgetary concern rather than actual sound penal theory. During the early twentieth century guards were not trained, and basked in the use of their unlimited authority. For instance, even though the Elmira Reformatory was thought to be humane at the time, the guards and staff used their authority to instill fear in the inmates of potential severe corporal punishments. Further in time the Glueck’s stated that the thought of the reformatory experiment was a large failure. Cruel and unusual punishments were not supposed to be allowed, sadly these methods were used to help contain the large amount of inmates that crowded the sometimes disgusting prisons. In addition, the correctional staff had a total disregard for human life …show more content…
The statistics given about how many psychiatrists, social workers, and psychologists that were available and how many inmates there were in relation was mind blowing. Also, keeping with staff, the staff that was employed were not trained professionals. Again, mentioned above, it was hard for the staff to correctly classify the offenders to get them where they needed to be, so this is a failure as well in regards to the philosophy at the time. Finally, we did see prisoners’ rights start to be recognized however, the system reverted back, and still used lashings, and flogging along with other horrible methods of punishment which was in contradiction to their philosophy (Morris & Rothman,