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Robert Magnus Martinson (May 19, 1927 – August 11, 1979) was an American sociologist whose 1974 article, “What Works?—Questions and Answers about Prison Reform,” concerning the shortcomings of existing prisoner rehabilitation programs, was highly influential, creating what became known as the “nothing works” doctrine. Some later articles of his expressed more positive views, suggesting alternate policies and procedures, but were less influential at the time.

He served as chairman of the Sociology Department at the City College of New York, and founded the Center for Knowledge in Criminal Justice Planning.

Family background and early life
Robert Martinson was born on May 19, 1927 in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Magnus Constantine “Con” Martinson and Gwendolyn (later “Gwynne”) A. Gagnon. His parents married young and in 1931 moved to Palo Alto, California where his mother had relatives. There Con found work as a bookkeeper. In the mid-1930s, with three other men and a woman, he was one of the founders of the Consumers Cooperative Society of Palo Alto that eventually had tens of thousands of members and became a major economic force in the area.

Robert Martinson’s paternal grandfather was a Lutheran pastor who left the ministry to become, first, an agent of the Anti-Saloon League and then a political consultant and aide to Charles A. Lindbergh --a progressive Republican who served in the U.S. Congress, 1907-1917 and fathered the famous aviator of the same name.

Early career
Martinson received all his degrees—BA (1949), MA (1953), PhD (1968)—from the University of California, Berkeley. For most of his adult life he was an ardent democratic socialist. In 1959 he ran for mayor of Berkeley as the Socialist Party candidate, garnering 18% of the vote.

During his twenties and thirties, he was active both in campus politics and in Bay Area theater as an actor. Tall and rangy, he was often described as flamboyant and a brilliant orator; in his later years, these qualities would prove to be mixed blessings. Short articles of his often appeared in leftwing, sometimes socialist periodicals.

On September 18, 1961 he married Rita J. Carter in San Francisco. The two had traveled south together as Freedom Riders a few months earlier. For almost seven weeks, Martinson was imprisoned in Mississippi; he soon wrote about his experience for The Nation. He also wrote a longer academic study of the group dynamics within his cohort of imprisoned Freedom Riders.

During the mid-1960s, while working for the Institute for the Study of Crime and Delinquency, associated with the School of Criminology at UC Berkeley, he wrote all but one chapter of a 343-page report, ‘’Staff Training and Correctional Change: A Study of Professional Training in Correctional Settings’’. It dealt with a failed project in California that had aimed to turn institutions for delinquent boys into therapeutic communities. His doctoral dissertation was largely based on the same research. This doctorate was granted by the Sociology department at UC, Berkeley, after he had moved to New York and embarked on the work that would make his international reputation.

Major Contributions in Criminology
Martinson’s investigation with Douglas Lipton and Judith Wilks regarding rehabilitation of inmates in prison was commissioned by the New York State Governor’s Special Committee on Criminal Offenders. It was based on 231 studies dated from 1945 to 1967, selected from a much larger pool of studies, many of which were rejected because they didn’t measure up to the team’s methodological standards. Martinson was entrusted with the job of writing up the results. His first draft was completed in 1970 but, because the results were considered unsuitable by the Governor’s Special Committee, the report was initially suppressed. It would only become available five years later as a result of an unrelated court case.

Meanwhile, in 1972 The New Republic published a four-part series of articles in which Martinson outlined what he called the paradox of prison reform. Enumerating five traditions in movements for reform, he described them as “1) Prisons are for punishing offenders…. 2) Prisons are vicious instruments of revenge and should be abolished…. 3) Prisons are necessary to defend civilization but they should be improved to make them less punitive and more humane…. 4) Prisons should be transformed into effective instruments for the rehabilitation of offenders. (This is ‘correctional treatment.’) 5) Prisons are necessary to some stages of civilization but can be replaced by milder forms of control to the degree permitted by democratic crime prevention. (The ‘social planning’ view).” He went on to say “I hope to document the disintegration of ‘correctional treatment’ (number 4) in the hope of laying the basis for ‘social planning’ (number 5.)” [15]

Drawing on New York State’s still unpublished overview study, he called for major policy changes. In the prisons of the sixties and seventies, reformers had created a mix of treatment programs. They were confident that a mix of basic education, vocational training, group and individual therapy, and treatment for substance abuse would transform offenders, preparing them to reenter society. In California, where Martinson had worked, faith in these programs spawned unexpected consequences. Officials sentenced offenders to flexible sentences, sometimes as vague as “one year to life.” Then they left it to untrained parole boards to determine how ready each applicant was for release.

Quoting from a book published the previous year, he wrote, “’’Struggle for Justice,’’ a recent report prepared for the American Friends Service Committee[16], notes a number of gross effects. ‘From 1959 to 1969 the median time served [in California] has risen from 24 month to 36 months, the longest in the country.’ [Also] ‘the number of persons incarcerated per 100,000 has continued to rise, from 65 in 1944 to 145 in 1965.’ ” [17] It didn’t look to Martinson like the system was working.

He argued that the longer the sentence, the more harm incarceration was likely to do—not merely to inmates but to society. “A relatively brief prison sojourn today may be more criminogenic than a much longer and more brutal sojourn a century ago .… The early prisons did not inhibit the offender from productive work, marriage, family …. To ‘make it’ in the 1970s requires a more exacting sequence of moves—high school or college, marriage, first job, bank account, next job, and so forth. Let us say that interference with this sequence produces ‘life cycle damage.’…. [P]rison produces its paradoxical result—more recidivism as it is enriched and improved … simply by removing him from society.”[18]

He urged that victimless crimes be decriminalized and police work be improved. Whenever possible, perpetrators should be kept in the community but they should be strictly monitored. He saw value in programs like work release and weekend jail lockup, as well as the old standbys, probation and parole.[19]

In 1974, when the overview study still had not been released for publication, Martinson’s now famous article, “What works? — Questions and answers about prison reform,” appeared in The Public Interest, a leading neoconservative magazine. [20] (This was remarkable because, never a neocon, Martinson had previously published primarily in leftist or professional journals.) In this piece, he asserted that virtually none of the treatment programs in prisons consistently served to rehabilitate inmates, to make it less likely that after they were released they would not re-offend. Soon after its publication, this article became required reading for criminologists and policy wonks around the world. Few of them seem to have read his closing paragraph.

In it he called for “something that does not so much reform convicted offenders as prevent criminal behavior in the first place” and calls for “a new family of studies … [that may help policy makers] judge to what degree the prison has become an anachronism and can be replaced by more effective means of social control.” It seems likely that, given Martinson’s longtime commitment to democratic socialism, he was hinting at the kind of welfare state policies—long followed in Scandinavia and other Western European democracies—that would lessen the gaps between rich and poor, privileged and underprivileged, and that would provide some kind of dole for the structurally unemployed.

The appearance of this article, followed soon after by the long-delayed publication of the overview study on which it drew, now entitled ‘’The Effectiveness of Correctional Treatment’’, made Martinson something of a public figure. Still the brilliant orator he had been as a flamboyant campus radical years before, he was invited to speak at conferences all over the United States and abroad and was interviewed by Sixty Minutes and People Magazine.[23]

His belittling appraisal of correctional treatment garnered him battalions of enemies among the teachers, therapists, and prison guards who made their living behind bars. Meanwhile his criminologist colleagues started blitzing him with sarcastic attacks saying that the data did not support his generalizations.

In 1976, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency set out to document both sides of this controversy since “the name Robert Martinson invariably arises in any assessment of rehabilitation.” It issued a small book which reprinted “What Works?”, two critiques of it, and Martinson’s responses to these critiques.[24]

The more negative elements of his findings were embraced by conservative politicians, and inspired a wave of harsh sentencing and defunding of rehabilitation programs. In response, Martinson, along with his colleague Judith Wilks, spoke out in 1976 against those “who stridently call for the institution of mandatory prison sentences for convicted offenders and preventive detention of accused offenders … [ignoring] the findings in our book that those placed on probation almost inevitably perform better relative to recidivism than do those of similar background and criminal history who are placed in prison. This is particularly true in the case of younger, first offenders.”[25]

Meanwhile, academics continued to criticize his conclusions and he himself sharply altered his stance. Starting in 1977, he expressed his change of heart on some research findings and his desire to clarify his position in articles and a letter published in professional journals and in comments made in person at conferences.[26] One publication reported that when a professor in a seminar, dismayed by Martinson’s about-face, asked him, “What will I now tell my students?” he replied, “Tell them I was full of crap.”[27]

On August 11, 1979, Martinson committed suicide by jumping from his twelfth floor Manhattan apartment.

Other references
Hart Wright, Sylvia. ‘’Activist: Adventures on the cutting edge of social change.’’ Memoir in progress. [Includes detailed observations on Martinson’s work and personal life as recalled by a longtime colleague and friend. As bibliographer of his opus magnum, she authored 92 pages of ‘’The Effectiveness of Correctional Treatment.’’ Her contribution is acknowledged in the book’s preface, p. vii.]

Martinson, Robert. (April 1976) “California research at the crossroads.” ‘’Crime and Delinquency,’’ 180-191.

Tierney, John. ( January 25, 2013) “Prison population can shrink when police crowd streets.” ‘’The New York Times’’ P. A1. [This article supplies a brief update on the enduring significance of Martinson’s work in the field of criminology.]

Bean, Philip. (2003) "Crime: Critical Concepts in Sociology", published by "Routledge" ISBN 0-415-25265-2 (Volume 1) Page 200-228