Lowering the bar: Rehabilitation of terrorist offenders

Abstract

This chapter examines how counterterrorism laws and related sentencing practices in the United States impact opportunities for prisoners to rehabilitate and re-join society, and how they represent a normalized exception to detention standards. Rehabilitation is established as a critical component of international human rights law on the treatment of prisoners and is supported as the appropriate objective of penitentiary systems. A case study on the United States, however, illustrates not only popular and political ambivalence toward rehabilitation of terrorist offenders but also reveals that the sentencing regime and jurisprudence associated with counterterrorism cases in the United States have consistently inhibited opportunities for rehabilitation. The chapter concludes that if rehabilitation were conceptualized as a cornerstone of penal responses to those convicted of terrorist crimes, it would ultimately help advance the interrelated goals of security and human rights.