THERE is now an ample body of research which attests to the effectiveness of treatment programmes in reducing offending, but some of the initial optimism resulting from the published treatment evaluations has given way to a more critical and measured appreciation about what is necessary to achieve good outcomes with offenders.
While the broad principles of targeting higher risk individuals and delivering programmes aimed at those aspects of their functioning which are related to offending are well established, it has become apparent that this is not the end of the matter. Increasingly, there are reports of programmes which have looked extremely promising when they are trialled in small scale studies, but which have failed to deliver the hoped-for gains once they have been rolled out on a larger scale. A good example of this is the failure of the British Cognitive Skills Programme which yielded promising results when it was piloted on offenders, but which failed to reduce offending when it was rolled out nationally. Likewise, a number of behavioural approaches which have proven effective with non-offender groups, such as assertiveness training and social skills training or approaches aimed at assisting people to better regulate their emotions, have been found to be very limited when applied to the more complex and entrenched behaviour patterns of offenders.
There is perhaps no better example of this than anger management programmes, which certainly have a value in community settings, where they have been shown to assist people to bring their temper under control. Such an approach is typically of considerable value in assisting parents to more constructively deal with bad behaviour in their children, and it also has a role to play in domestic violence programmes where increasing relationship tension often mobilises strong feelings which find their outlet in acts of interpersonal aggression.
Anger management on its own, however, has been found to have minimal impact when it is employed as an approach to dealing with people with chronic histories of violence. One obvious reason for this is that violent offenders do not necessarily behave in that manner because they are angry. Rather than responding violently as a result of frustration or in reaction to perceived slight, their aggression is often the end result of learned behaviour which has characterised their family of origin, and which has served to achieve desired goals. Such violence is known as "instrumental" violence, which is a deliberate and often premeditated way of exerting influence over others to gain material assets, prestige, or compliance from those who are intimidated by such behaviour.
While the literature clearly shows that anger management programmes have the capacity to help individuals in community settings, there is increasing evidence that its value is very limited when applied to offender population. One typical example is a paper by Kevin Howells and colleagues 1. Consistent with other published reports, no clinically or statistically significant gains were achieved for those offenders who participated in the programme and the authors posit a number of possible reasons for this.
Typically, such anger management programmes are of short duration and address only one area of the person's functioning. By contrast, most offenders who are imprisoned for acts of violence display an entrenched pattern of aggression which is associated with their thinking processes, value systems, and personality make-up. Not only is anger management alone likely to be insufficient in terms of the intensity and duration of treatment, but as it fails to address the multifaceted nature of long-term violent behaviour, reductions in reoffending, were they to occur at all, would be expected to be minimal.
Most modern approaches to violence prevention in correctional settings adopt a much broader view and aim to develop a comprehensive understanding in the individual of the origins of their violence, the factors which have served to perpetuate it, and the way in which their thinking patterns, value systems and social networks have served to maintain it. Additionally, it is now generally accepted that effective treatment for violence needs to be more intensive, longer term, and if possible engage not only the individual, but also their family system in overcoming their potential to behaving aggressively.
1 Howells K., Day A., Babner S., Jauncey S., Parker A., Willamson P., and Heseltine K., Not Working?: An Evaluation of Anger Management Programs with Violent Offenders Two Australian States. Forensic and Applied Psychology Research Group, University of South Australia.
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ISSN 1178-8453