Is it the government’s responsibility to rehabilitate us?
“The state’s exercise of power over people through the criminal justice system is often also justified as a means of rehabilitating them. Again, this is an after-the-fact justification: imprisonment had been around for a long time before state officials took the idea of rehabilitation seriously. But if people are going to be imprisoned anyway, doubtless it’s a good idea (from the standpoint of the state) to have a modern-sounding reason for incarcerating them.
The idea of rehabilitation is surely, in principle, a good one: it would be nice if people who didn’t care about others’ interests changed their attitudes and their behavior in positive ways. But giving the state responsibility for rehabilitating people is very troubling.
First, it gives the state the authority to decide what kinds of character traits need to be eliminated or encouraged. Thus, it injects the state into a highly contentious area of debate within any society and expects it to exercise a level of competence of which it’s not really capable.
Second, it gives the state enormous power over individuals—not only power to regulate their conduct, which is bad enough, but power to regulate their characters and personalities.
Third, it gives the state this power without any clearly defined limit. Just what is a satisfactory level of rehabilitation? How long does it take for the right kind of rehabilitation to occur? Who’s to say that someone is suitably rehabilitated? There are no objective standards on which everyone can agree, and the person to be rehabilitated can thus be entrusted indefinitely to the merciful care of the state.”
— Gary Chartier, The Conscience of an Anarchist (page 73)
