By David Riley, Director of Corrections’ Psychological Services
Our ability to rehabilitate offenders is no longer in dispute. The last thirty years have seen more than 2,500 evaluations of treatment programmes for offenders, and these have consistently demonstrated that approaches using cognitive-behavioural methods targeting offenders at a higher risk, produce positive outcomes.
There are, however, also some disturbing findings. For example, with youthful offenders it has been shown that group programmes which follow best practice principles can be rendered ineffective if negative peer pressures are not adequately managed.
Of even greater concern is the observation that some programmes which have yielded positive results when first trialled, fail to be effective when implemented more widely. This was the case in England where a cognitive skills programme impacted significantly on re-offending when piloted, but then failed to deliver any such results when it was widely implemented in English prisons.
Results like these demonstrate that while we have a clear picture of ‘what works’, ‘getting it to work’, is not as straightforward as we first thought. Therefore, increasingly researchers have focused their attention on more subtle factors such as the quality of the programme implementation and integrity of service provision.
In a recent paper, Lowenkamp et al (2006)1 applied a measure of programme quality and integrity – The Correctional Program Assessment Inventory (CPAI) developed by Paul Grendreau and Don Andrews, to a significant number of programmes for offenders, and analysed the relationship between CPAI scores and downstream recidivism.
Total score on the CPAI was significantly related to recidivism, with those programmes scoring in the ‘satisfactory’ range or above, producing favourable results. More specifically, quality of programme implementation, offender assessment, and evaluation were found to be important in determining the effectiveness of a correctional programme.
1 Lowenkamp C., Latessa E., and Smith P. (2006), Does correctional program quality really matter? The impact of adhering to the principles of effective intervention. Criminology and Public Policy, 5, pp 575-594.
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