Rehabilitation

This chapter addresses the question of whether rehabilitation would make a good distributive principle for liability and punishment. It shows that skepticism about its effectiveness has resulted in little support for the use of rehabilitation as a distributive principle. Few existing American codes give significant deference to it. Indeed, some explicitly reject it as a distributive principle, while others do so implicitly. The Model Penal Code, for example, omits rehabilitation from its list of the “general purposes of the provisions governing the definition of offenses”.