Correctional Programs

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Chapter 11

• Correctional Programs

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Correctional Programs

• Key Issues
• Fairness of punishment by deprivation
• Efficiency of teaching productive life skills
• Failures get more attention than success
• System currently designed to punish cheaply
• Little effort to cut recidivism

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Habilitative Services

• Provide basic skills that most acquire in normal
  socialization
• Literacy, interview and job skills, basic life
  managemnt (budgets, parenting)
• Academic literacy and GED most common
• Job skills best at cutting recidivism
• Recreation, religion also important, old

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Academic Programs

• Clearly correlated with low recidivism
• Promote a self-image that discourages crime
• Self-discipline and investment in society
• Also attracts those least likely to recidivate?
• Frills important for most hardened
• Violates principle of least eligibility

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Vocational Training

• Most likely to reduce recidivism if it leads to
  good jobs after release
• Prisons often define maintenance chores as
  vocational training
• Companies reluctant to get involved without
  government assistance
• Values of administrators, work supervisors,
  inmates and companies differ

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Life Skills

• Healthy interpersonal communication
• Emotional and stress management
• Managing money
• Education may also be included
• Thought patterns are at root of behavior, self
  esteem a symptom

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Treatment Programs

• 3 reduction in recidivism makes any program
  cost-effective
• Responsibility model dominant for economic,
  political reasons
• Stresses accountability for ones choices
• Confrontational style
• Para-professional staff

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Challenges to Treatment

• Lack of quality programs
• Lack of custodial support for participation
• Fear, and hostility of inmate culture
• Inmate resistance to self-examination, disclosure
  and personal change
• Denial typical of compulsive, addictive behaviors

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Compulsive Behaviors

• Repeated despite expectation of adverse
  consequences
• Relieves fear and brings pleasure
• Especially in addicts, sex offenders
• Craving/compulsion is experienced at the survival
  level even though it is actually a threat to
  survival
• Denial, thinking errors pose special challenges

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Approaches to Treatment

• Basic treatment amenability
• Readiness of inmate to change, benefit from
  programming
• Differential intervention strategies
• Addresses unique issuesof offender, offenses

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Treatment Facts

• Drug/alcohol treatment most common
• Sex-offender treatment most needed
• Self help and other groups most common
• 20 of those needing treatment actually get it in
  prison, most occurs in community
• Parolees pay for own treatment
• Probation often helps fund treatment

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Cognitive Therapy

• Most effective in cutting recidivism since 1980s
• Focuses on logic of conscious choice making
• Rational control of emotions stressed
• Changes false beliefs that lead to bad choices
• Confronts thinking errors such as minimizing,
  rationalizing, playing the victim, criminal pride
• Compatible with reliance on group sessions

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Therapeutic Discipline

• Keep busy to avoid self-pity, frustration
• Repeatedly show links between choices, actions
  and outcomes
• Keep focus on problem behavior
• Have a minimum of rules
• Encourage new behaviors
• Reward all positive choices

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Themes of Successful Programs

• Keep client focused on choices, alternatives
• Challenge thinking errors, victim stancing
• Encourage new approaches to problem solving,
  decision-making, self-disclosure
• Reward good behavior, honesty
• Prison environment discourages these

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Types of Therapies

• Individual counseling
• Group counseling (led by professional)
• Most common for financial, theoretical reasons
• 12-step groups (led by participants)
• Specialized treatment programs
• Substance abusers
• Sex offenders
• Polygraphs and plethysmographs

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12 Step Groups

• Based on Alcoholics Anonymous (1939)
• Spiritual basis, avoids specific religions
• Promote self-esteem by focusing attention on the
  ability to control a problem behavior
• Used for addiction, sex offenses, wide range of
  problem (compulsive) behaviors
• No cost volunteer led
• Easy to find in community

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The Relapse Cycle

• Preparation seemingly unimportant decisions
  (SUDs), stress
• Relapse
• Fantasy (sex offenders)
• Use (substance offenders)
• Identify triggers and other early signs
• Stop cycle early to control compulsive behavior

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Sex Offender Control

• Re-offense rate debated
• Overestimated by politicians, media, public
• Chemical castration (Depo-Provera)
• Some European studies supportive
• Mixed results in many studies
• Civil commitment following imprisonment
• Upheld by Kansas v. Crane (2002)

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Treatment and Power

• Treatment requires offenders to respect selves
  and others, assert own needs
• Punishment and tradition require inmates to be
  powerless, dependent
• Thus, the contradiction between reintegration and
  retribution