Webster Merriam Dictionary

Rehabilitation:

1 a: to restore to a former capacity, to REINSTATE b: to restore to good repute: reestablish the good name of
2 a: to restore to a former state (as of efficiency, good management, or solvency) <rehabilitate slum areas> b: to restore or bring to a condition of health or useful and constructive activity.

The word rehabilitation as used in the penal system is inaccurate. Most inmates, as children, never became completely habilitated.

There are basically two categories of prisoners: Those who never ever were in good repute, who never had a good name, and those who started out being good and then committed a perpetration.

Even the person who started out "good" was missing some unidentifiable quality, strength, or skill, or a role model that was supposed to have served them. Instead they ended up having virtually no will or choice in the matter.

To rehabilitate a parolee only restores them to their former state, with the identical karma and coping skills that we already know did not serve him/her well.

No matter how good a job the correctional system does at "rehabilitating" a prisoner, the minute a parolee leaves the closely supervised prison world they return to the community of interactions and conversations that supported them in not going straight (read The First 24 Hours).

During the '60s speech therapists discovered the futility of working with a child with a speech impediment without spending equal session-time with both parents. Undergrad speech-therapists learned this during practical lab time in which they served as an understudy to a graduate student doing actual case work. Together, an undergraduate majoring in speech pathology, and a post graduate student, would spend dozens of appointment hours with a child only to find that at the end of a semester the child had not only not improved, sometimes they had gotten worse. What they discovered is that it doesn't work to "fix" a child and send him/her home to the social/familial system that caused/rewards stuttering.

Just as a loving family member's leadership-communication skills can cause his/her child to stutter (assuming the impediment is not physical) so too can a "loving" parent communicate in a way that supports their child in not going straight. Most such results are produced non-verbally.

Put another way. You cannot not support someone. How you relate and interact and communicate either inspires another to excel (grow), plateau (mediocrity), or decline (crash). It's all about your leadership-communication skills.

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