By David Riley, Director of Corrections’ Psychological Services
One of the “elder statesmen” of correctional psychology, Stanley Brodsky, has just published a brief essay chronicling the history of the American Association of Correctional Psychology1.
Beginning with a very small group of psychologists in the US in the 1960s, the problems faced by these early practitioners in many ways mirror the fluctuating fortunes of the rehabilitative ideal. Early professional intervention was undertaken in custodial environments, hostile to the notion of offender treatment, and isolated individuals operated without any firm overarching theory of change or repertoire of empirically validated treatment approaches.
It is little wonder, then, that a review of published treatment studies in 1974 by the sociologist, Robert Martinson, which questioned the efficacy of attempts to rehabilitate offenders, had a very significant impact. Martinson’s views were embraced by policy makers and legislators caught up in the conservative political climate of North America in the 1970s, and many potentially promising initiatives were prematurely abandoned in favour of the “just deserts” model of criminal justice, a model which asserts that the punishment fit the crime, and that the aim of sentencing is retribution and deterrent.
Although Martinson later published a partial retraction of his “nothing works” treaties, it was largely as a result of some dedicated practitioners in Canada and the US that the notion of rehabilitation was kept alive during the decade following Martinson’s attack on treatment.
They undertook detailed analyses of the available treatment evaluations and came to the conclusion that, far from nothing working, a good deal of the material did indicate that structured approaches targeting areas of thinking, feeling, and behaviour, showed real promise. Other initiatives based upon mental health approaches aimed at reducing anxiety or enhancing self-esteem appeared to have little impact on downstream offending.
When the more modern technique of meta-analysis became available – a statistical approach which allows for the systematic summarising of the results of numerous studies – the trends became even clearer. A major early piece of work in this area describing itself as “psychologically informed and clinically relevant” was one of the first which very clearly enunciated those principles of effective correctional practice which are embodied in the Department of Corrections approach to offender rehabilitation.
Since then, there have been over 25 major meta-analyses of treatment evaluation studies, which in total involve over 2500 pieces of research which evaluated treatment effectiveness. Reassuringly, all this work has reaffirmed that the approaches to rehabilitation which focus upon targeting specific crime causing factors in high-risk individuals are the most effective and continue to yield positive outcomes for those who are the recipients of such treatment.
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ISSN 1178-8453