At present, in the correction social work in China the welfare mode is mainly adopted, which now faces the examination of professionalism and effectiveness. Different schools of western criminology put forward different crime prevention strategies. After the positivist school, rehabilitation became the mainstream, and correction social work thus developed vigorously. However, from the mid-1970s, the effectiveness of correctional social work was questioned unprecedentedly, and the anti-correctional movement led to a serious setback of correctional social work. From the 1990s, the Evidence-Based Correction Movement in North America began to comprehensively and quantitatively verify the factors affecting crime and recidivism, and drew a number of core principles and factors. The welfare model of correctional social work in China is mainly embodied in Shanghai model, but it is forced to be finally integrated with criminal justice. It is concluded that effective correction should be based on the combination of empirical knowledge, practical knowledge and wisdom, which requires the deep integration of social work with criminology, law and local knowledge.