Theory of Correctional Programming (AKA Effective Correctional Treatment or Correctional Rehabilitation)

The Psychology of Criminal Conduct (PCC)

The psychology of criminal conduct (PCC) emerged as the brainchild of Canadian Researcher Don Andrews in the 1980s, and is based on 7 essential criteria.

It is Empirical

PCC ensures that the content it uses to make decisions in both practice and research is empirically-derived, or based on evidence. It accepts only rigourously-tested, reliable, and consistent data that possess surface validity, dynamic validity, and predictive validity. It also sets a minimum cutoff of accuracy, a pearson r of .20. This means that to claim a certain personality factor is causally related to the commission of crime, the experimental group possessing the factor must demonstrate 20% greater recidivism rates than the control group not possessing the factor. This kind of minimum level of accepted accuracy is common in psychological practice, but takes on a particular importance when used in assessing criminal risk levels of individuals.

It is Ethical

Like standard psychological practice, the PCC adheres to several fundamental ethical principles. It supports the notions of integrity (proper administration, sound, rational, and empirically-based decisions), justice (fairness and equality for all individuals), non-maleficience (the desire not to harm others), beneficience (the desire to do good), and autonomy (individual rights)

It is Practical

It provides human service delivery with essential content for treatment programs, risk assessment, and prison classification. Through empirical findings and rigourously-tested research, PCC enriches assessment tools with proper risk factors, ensuring a minimum degree of accuracy is reached before making a decision. It also identifies the treatment targets needed for human service delivery, such as antisocial thoughts, attitudes, peers, associations, or personality features. In prison-classification, it identifies those features of offenders that are most likely to result in prison infractions and violation of rules, including escape attempts and staff-directed violence. It also ensures proper allocation of offenders to security levels most suited to them, savings taxpayers money while increasing public safety.

It Identifies Criminal Covariates

Years of forensic research has yeilded consistent findings regarding the causal relationship between certain features and criminal predisposition. These are known as the Big-4 factors (antisocial attitudes, peers, history, and personality) and Big-8 factors (Big-4, plus liesure/recreation, family, employment, and substance abuse).

It is based on Social Learning Theory

Individuals learn behaviours either directly or vicariously. These skills can be either functional or dysfunctional, conducive to the law, or hostile to the law. Individuals develop definitions favourable or unfavourable to the law, and the choice to commit crime depends on a subjective, relative “weighting” of which actions are either favourable or unfavourable. Criminal behaviour is learned like any other behaviour, and, like other learning, includes the techniques, motivations and attitudes necessary to successfully learn that behaviour.

It uses Explanatory Models

Models abound in the PCC, from Novaco’s model of anger, to Farrington’s and Moffitt’s pathways to crime.

It involves Individual Differences

Keen interest into the uniqueness of individuals is a key componenet of the PCC, as treatment and rehabilitation, as well as risk assessment and classification, must be sensitive to specific life circumstances and personal characteristics. Different learning styles among individuals means different treatment methods; different ethnicities, ages, and gender mean different therapists and treatment contexts. Whether one suffers from a mental illness or not is vital in allocating security, supervision, assessment, treatment and aftercare. There is no one single, homogenous group of offenders that are “different” from the rest of us.

An Alternative or Adjunct to Risk-Needs Approaches? The Good Lives Approach

Recently there has been greater focus on promoting a broader, more general treatment approach, called the “Good Lives” Model. This model criticizes existing risk-needs approaches as too narrow in reducing criminal behaviour. Individuals are seen by correctional agencies as a “package of risks” (McGuire 2005), and crime reduction is seen as being achieved from lowering those risks through the acquisition of specified skills. In a sense, offenders are thus “corrected,” and nothing more.

The Good Lives approach, however, argues that the standard risk-needs approach fails to aknowledge individuals’ sense of pursuit of self-interest and personal notions of achievement, possibly overemphasizing the simple need to “correct” offenders instead of guide them to more satisfying, goal-directed lives. Risk-needs also fails to recongize each offender’s unique and subjective view of his or her “ideal” life. The Good Lives approach argues that every offender has inherent difficulties and skills that, while causally related to criminal behaviour, may be unrealistic as treatment targets. In essence, while the majority of offenders on average will benefit from the broad nomothetic angle taken by risk-needs, many individuals will benefit more from an offender-specific, ideographic angle. For instance, as Ward (2002) notes, conceptions of good lives require a consideration of the offenders’ particular profile of capacities, perferences, commitments, and the possible opportunities available in the world” (526). Ward highlights findings by Maruna, who demonstrated that active, persisting criminals had very different conceptions of themselves compared to recently rehabilitated, ex-offenders. While persisters followed a “condemnation script,” which allowed offenders to see themselves as victims of some higher deterministic process, ex-offenders followed a “redemption script,” which allowed them to reinterpret their past behaviour into a personal narrative in which they could conceptualize their life-course progression from “bad” to “good.” In this way, they forged new identities that directly opposed their offending identities (523).

| bookmark page

NOTE: This discussion board has been temporarily shut down due to an unreasonably high volume of posts not meeting our terms and conditions. We apologize to all those contributors who follow the rules. If you would still like to contribute announcements, news, criticism, suggestions, articles, stories, or artwork, please email the webmaster or use the form on our submissions page. Thank you.