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Assessing Correctional Rehabilitation - Policy, Practice, and Prospects (Paperback)
Loot Price: R375
Discovery Miles 3 750
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Assessing Correctional Rehabilitation - Policy, Practice, and Prospects (Paperback)
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Loot Price R375
Discovery Miles 3 750
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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A theme that has persisted throughout the history of American
corrections is that efforts should be made to reform offenders. In
particular, at the beginning of the 1900s, the rehabilitative ideal
was enthusiastically trumpeted and helped to direct the renovation
of the correctional system (e.g., implementation of indeterminate
sentencing, parole, probation, a separate juvenile justice system).
For the next seven decades, offender treatment reigned as the
dominant correctional philosophy. Then, in the early 1970s,
rehabilitation suffered a precipitous reversal of fortune. The
larger disruptions in American society in this era prompted a
general critique of the "state run" criminal justice system.
Rehabilitation was blamed by liberals for allowing the state to act
coercively against offenders, and was blamed by conservatives for
allowing the state to act leniently toward offenders. In this
context, the death knell of rehabilitation was seemingly sounded by
Robert Martinson's (1974b) influential "nothing works" essay, which
reported that few treatment programs reduced recidivism. This
review of evaluation studies gave legitimacy to the antitreatment
sentiments of the day; it ostensibly "proved" what everyone
"already knew" Rehabilitation did not work. In the subsequent
quarter century, a growing revisionist movement has questioned
Martinson's portrayal of the empirical status of the effectiveness
of treatment interventions. Through painstaking literature reviews,
these revisionist scholars have shown that many correctional
treatment programs are effective in decreasing recidivism. More
recently, they have undertaken more sophisticated quantitative
syntheses of an increasing body of evaluation studies through a
technique called "meta-analysis." These meta-analyses reveal that
across evaluation studies, the recidivism rate is, on average, 10
percentage points lower for the treatment group than for the
control group. However, this research has also suggested that some
correctional interventions have no effect on offender criminality
(e.g., punishment-oriented programs), while others achieve
substantial reductions in recidivism (i.e., approximately 25
percent). This variation in program success has led to a search for
those "principles" that distinguish effective treatment
interventions from ineffective ones. There is theoretical and
empirical support for the conclusion that the rehabilitation
programs that achieve the greatest reductions in recidivism use
cognitive-behavioral treatments, target known predictors of crime
for change, and intervene mainly with high-risk offenders.
"Multisystemic treatment" is a concrete example of an effective
program that largely conforms to these principles. In the time
ahead, it would appear prudent that correctional policy and
practice be "evidence based." Knowledgeable about the extant
research, policymakers would embrace the view that rehabilitation
programs, informed by the principles of effective intervention, can
"work" to reduce recidivism and thus can help foster public safety.
By reaffirming rehabilitation, they would also be pursuing a policy
that is consistent with public opinion research showing that
Americans continue to believe that offender treatment should be an
integral goal of the correctional system.
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