At the end of 2003 there were almost 2? million people incarcerated in the US. While the reasons for this burgeoning prison population are varied, the general consensus among social scientists specialising in this field is that penal institutions are becoming more difficult to manage.
Within the prison management literature, anti-social behaviour is typically defined in terms of prison misconduct, and increasingly attention has turned to how such behaviour may be reduced. Three general approaches have been suggested. These are the ‘get tough, no frills’ prison environment, a raft of prison management/institutional control strategies, and approaches based on the provision of programmes.
In a just-published work, French and Gendreau1 report on the outcome of a meta-analysis of the impact of programmes on prison misconduct. Analysis of the results of 68 studies involving over 21,000 offenders indicated that the characteristics of programmes which resulted in reductions in institutional misbehaviour, were similar to the findings in relation to the effectiveness research on recidivism more generally.
By far the most effective approach to reducing institutional misconducts was the provision of behavioural programmes, which were almost two-and-a-half times more effective than non-behavioural and educational/vocational approaches.
In practical terms, the results suggest that prison misconducts can be reduced by about 26 percent for behavioural programmes, which the authors note can have very significant financial implications for offender management in larger institutions.
Other findings which emerged from this study were that therapeutic integrity was an important mediating variable and, as would be expected, the programmes rating high on integrity achieved the best results. Also, this study reenforced earlier findings that greater benefits are achieved when these programmes are delivered in dedicated units within the institutional environment.
Finally, as has already been noted, the magnitude of these effects corresponds closely to the findings of research on offender rehabilitation. A corollary is that, when recidivism rates were examined following release, those programmes which were effective in reducing the rates of prisoner misbehaviour were also those programmes which achieved significant reductions in subsequent re-offending.
1 French, Sheila A & Gendreau, Paul (2005). Reducing Prison Misconducts: What Works! Clinical Justice and Behaviour, Vol 33 (2), Apr 2006, pp. 185-218.
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