Chapter 11

Correctional Programs

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

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

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

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

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

Treatment Programs

• 3% reduction in recidivism makes any program cost-effective

• Responsibility model dominant for economic, political reasons

• Stresses accountability for one’s choices

• Confrontational style

• Para-professional staff

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

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

Approaches to Treatment

• Basic treatment amenability– Readiness of inmate to change, benefit

from programming

• Differential intervention strategies– Addresses unique issues

of offender, offenses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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