Rehabilitation and Repression

Abstract

For over a century, scholars and practitioners have assumed rehabilitation stands as the progressiveopposite of repression. Elaborating on previous warnings and anomalous findings, a representativesurvey of the Dutch population (N = 1,892) points out that this received view is flawed. Whenmeasured separately, no significant correlation exists between support for rehabilitation and supportfor repression, rehabilitation is equally popular among the constituencies of conservative andprogressive political parties, and no negative relationship exists be tween rehabilita tion and author-itarianism. Decriminalization rather than rehabilitation proves to constitute the progressive converseof repression. By way of conclusion, we discuss the remarkable persistence of the received view reas-sessed in this paper, even in the face of convincing earlier contradictory evidence.