Question

Imagine you work in a correctional institution and oversee the programs offered to offenders. The budget only has room for one program at this time and you must determine which would provide the most benefit to inmates. You have been tasked with analyzing different programs and proposing one program to implement. You will provide an executive summary of your proposal to your supervisor.

Create a 700- to 1,050-word executive summary in which you:

• Compare the programs by explaining the program goals, target population, and program components for each program.
• Analyze the program outcomes of each program.
• Determine which is most effective and propose a program to implement. Provide statistical research to support your proposal for your answer.
• Explain how this program will benefit your correctional institution.

Answer 1

To prepare offenders for return to their communities and reduce recidivism, inmates are provided opportunities while incarcerated to address health needs and develop life and work skills. Correctional facilities may offer inmates substance abuse and mental health treatment, and some institutions offer educational classes such as literacy classes, English as a Second Language, parenting classes, wellness education, adult continuing education, and library services. The aim is to help offenders integrate back into their communities and address issues which lead to their offending. Some offenders will have specific programmes which are a condition of their community payback order or prison licence while others will work with their social worker to address issues.

Throughcare addictions service

The aim of the throughcare addictions service is to provide continued support and treatment for drug users in the six weeks immediately following release from prison:

• There must be at least 2 face to face meetings with the prisoner prior to release to agree the community integration plan. This involves identifying, referring and linking the prisoner to community-based services
• Arrangements are made to see the prisoner within 2 days after release

Drug and Alcohol Intervention

The Criminal Justice Drug and Alcohol Intervention team provide a range of services, including drug testing and treatment orders, working with offenders with a community payback order drug and/or alcohol requirement, and working with prisoners serving short term prison sentences (less than 31 days), or remanded in custody, with alcohol issues. This is aimed at breaking the repetitive cycle of problematic alcohol use, related offending and short custodial sentences by engaging prisoners when they are in custody, continuing to work with them once released and, if necessary, following them back into and out from prison again.

Offending awareness programme

This programme is delivered by Action for Children https://www.actionforchildren.org.uk (external link)  and is for men and women subject to a community payback order. it is for offenders over the age of 16 years assessed as being at medium to high risk of re-offending.

The aim is to raise the offending awareness of participants with a view to reducing the risk of re-offending. The objectives are to encourage participants to consider the consequences of their offending and introduce them to skills to help them better manage their behaviour and understand the victim perspective.

Key features:

• The programme is available in the Inverness and Ross-shire areas of Highland. The aim is for each offender to start the programme within 6 weeks of being placed on an order
• The programme is available as a group work or individual programme
• A number of modules are delivered, including facing up to offending, gains and losses, triggers and consequences, victim perspective, problem solving, communication and self control, substance misuse and use of leisure

Training and supported employment service

Apex Scotland (external link) are funded to work with offenders subject to statutory supervision in the community to help them with their employability needs and progress towards employment, education and training and to create equality of access to employment and to employment opportunities for individuals with a criminal record, designed to reduce re-offending:

• It is available to males and females over the age of 16 years in the inner Moray Firth area
• The project provides structured and supportive programmes, including a comprehensive employment preparation service, literacy and numeracy assessment, a programme for those who are not in a state of readiness to begin employment preparation, a programme for those with alcohol and drugs misuse problems, an individual course in life skills, core skills, vocational skills and personal skills, and a course on the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act and issues of conviction, disclosure and employment. An individual programme is developed including both one-to-one work and group work
• Programme length is dependent upon the client’s needs and ongoing support is offered once the agreed programme has been completed

Moving Forward: Making Changes

The MF:MC team work with adults (18+) who have been convicted of a sexual offence and provide regular assessment and programme interventions. MF:MC is a groupwork programme that consists of pre-programme work and a combination of essential and optional modules. Attendance will be as part of a community payback order programme requirement or prison licence condition. This comprehensive programme is aimed at individuals convicted of a sexual offence. The main aims are to:

• help the individual to under their risk factors
• provide an opportunity to address the factors relevant to their offending
• assist people to develop the skills to make changes in their thinking and behaviour
• help individuals to develop plans to reduce the risk of them causing sexual harm to others
• work in partnership with other agencies in the management and assessment of risk, including MAPPA

Caledonian System

This is an integrated approach to address men's domestic abuse and to improve the lives of women, children and men. Domestic abuse can include physical abuse, sexual abuse and mental and emotional abuse. It is a pattern of behaviour and needs to be understood in the historical and current context of gender and equality. It is learned and functional behaviour.

Educational Programming- Education, like employment, is considered to be a moderate criminogenic need (Andrews, Bonta, & Wormith, 2006). Compared to the general public, prisoners are often undereducated. For example, Duwe and Clark (2014) reported that roughly two-fifths of offenders entering Minnesota prisons had neither a high school diploma nor a General Educational Development (GED) degree. The prevalence of educational programming in prisons is likely due to the well-documented relationship between low educational achievement and antisocial behaviors. Several studies have linked poor academic performance among adolescents to juvenile delinquency and future offending, although the direction of the causal relationship remains unclear (e.g., Farrington, 2005; Hagan & McCarthy, 1997; Huizinga et al., 2000; Maguin & Loeber, 1996; Moffitt, 1993). A felony record diminishes the likelihood of future employment (Berstein & Houston, 2000), and many offenders have unstable work histories (Visher, LaVigne, & Travis, 2004). Moreover, unemployment rates appear to directly correspond with levels of education, and the employment prospects for offenders are already weak, regardless of their educational attainment.

Employment Programming- Research suggests that work is a buffer against crime and, more narrowly, recidivism (Skardhamar & Telle, 2012). Individuals are less likely to commit crime when they work more often (Uggen, 1999) and have employment that is stable (Crutchfield & Pitchford, 1997), considered satisfying (Uggen, 1999), and perceived as having career potential (Huiras, Uggen, & McMorris, 2000). As noted above, however, offenders have criminal records and are often undereducated, both of which make it more difficult to find employment following release from prison. To address this criminogenic need, correctional systems frequently provide prisoners with employment programming, which includes prison labor opportunities as well as participation in programs such as work release.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy- Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) programs generally address the link between dysfunctional thought processes and harmful behaviors through timely reinforcement and punishment, as well as role-playing and skill-building exercises. These programs seek to improve decisionmaking and problem-solving skills, and to teach individuals how to manage various forms of outside stimuli. The programs attempt to reduce recidivism by targeting an array of risk factors, including general antisocial cognition and chemical dependency. It is worth noting that other types of programs, including substance abuse treatment and sex offender treatment, are often delivered within a cognitive-behavioral framework. This section of the paper, however, focuses on the more general CBT programs that address multiple criminogenic needs, but mostly criminal thinking.

Chemical Dependency Treatment- Among state and federal prisoners incarcerated in 2004, Mumola and Karberg (2006) reported that 32 percent committed their offenses while under the influence of drugs and 56 percent had used drugs in the month preceding the offense. Substance abuse has been identified as a moderate criminogenic need, although recent research suggests that it may be a more important risk factor for recidivism (Caudy, Durso, & Taxman, 2013). Given the relatively high rate of substance abuse and dependency among incarcerated offenders, efforts to reduce their risk of reoffense often include the provision of prison-based CD treatment. Previous evaluations of prison-based CD treatment have concentrated mainly on programs that use the therapeutic community (TC) model. Originating in England during the late 1940s, the TC model regards CD as a symptom of an individual’s problems rather than the problem itself (Patenaude & LaufersweillerDwyer, 2002). Viewing substance abuse as a disorder that affects the whole person, the TC model attempts to promote comprehensive prosocial changes by encouraging participants to contribute to their own therapy and to that of others through activities such as therapy, work, education classes, and recreation (Klebe & O’Keefe, 2004). Individual and group counseling, encounter groups, peer pressure, role models, and a system of incentives and sanctions often comprise the core of treatment interventions in a TC program (Welsh, 2002). To foster a greater sense of community, participants are housed separately from the rest of the prison population.

Sex Offender Treatment- Existing research has shown that compared to other offenders, sex offenders are among the least likely to reoffend (Harris & Hanson, 2004; Langan & Levin, 2002; Sample & Bray, 2006). Moreover, when sex offenders recidivate, they are much more likely to do so with a nonsexual offense (Langan, Schmitt, & Durose, 2003). Although sex offenders are among the least likely to recidivate in general, they are still more likely than other offenders to reoffend sexually (Langan & Levin, 2002). When sex offenders recidivate with a sex offense, at least 75 percent victimize individuals (both adults and children) they already know (Greenfield, 1997; Snyder, 2000). Common predictors of sexual recidivism include an antisocial orientation (e.g., history of rule violation), deviant sexual interests, a history of victimizing strangers, conflicts in intimate relationships, emotional identification with children, and prior noncontact sex offenses (Hanson & Morton-Bourgon, 2004). The risk of sexual recidivism is lower for incest offenders, firsttime sex offenders, those over the age of 50, and those who target female children rather than male children (Harris & Hanson, 2004).

Social Support Programming- Associating with antisocial peers is, as noted earlier, one of the big four risk factors and, thus, has been characterized as a major criminogenic need. A prison inmate is surrounded by peers who are also incarcerated for antisocial, criminal behavior. Yet, even among prisoners, one relatively objective measure for determining whether offenders are maintaining antisocial relationships is their security threat group (STG) status. Offenders who are active STG members (i.e., an active gang affiliation) are, in general, committed to preserving a criminal lifestyle. Research has shown that gang membership is not only positively associated with prison misconduct (Gaes et al., 2002; Tewksbury, Connor, & Denney, 2014), but it also significantly increases the risk of recidivism, at least for male offenders (Duwe, 2014c).

Mental Health Programming- Compared to the general population, prisoners have relatively high rates of mental illness (Fazel & Danesh, 2002). In a study that reported the results of interviews with more than 20,000 offenders across the United States, James and Glaze (2006) found that nearly two-thirds of jail inmates and more than half of state and federal prisoners reported having a mental health problem. The researchers also found that offenders with mental illness — who were more likely to be female, white, and young — experienced higher rates of institutional misconduct, homelessness, substance abuse, and previous physical or sexual abuse.

Domestic Violence Programming- Family criminality (i.e., parents or siblings in trouble with the law), rearing practices (e.g., conflict, abuse, lack of supervision and affection), and structure (e.g., separation from parents, broken home, foster parents) have been found to be significant, static predictors of recidivism (Gendreau, Little, & Goggin, 1996). Gendreau and colleagues further note that interpersonal conflict, which includes family discord and conflict with significant others, is a dynamic predictor of reoffending. Given the association between family conflict and recidivism, family/marital conflict is, as noted earlier, a moderate risk factor (Andrews, Bonta, & Wormith, 2006). To address this criminogenic need, corrections agencies frequently provide offenders with programming designed to reduce domestic violence (DV) recidivism.

Prisoner Re-Entry Programs- Since the turn of the 21st century, prisoner re-entry has attracted a great deal of interest for a few key reasons. First, despite the modest downturn in the imprisonment rate over the last ten years, the prison population boom over the previous several decades had led to a rise in the volume of offenders released from prison. Second, as illustrated by the large recidivism studies conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (Durose, Cooper, & Snyder, 2014; Langan & Levin, 2002), the available evidence suggests that released prisoners tend to have relatively low success rates. In response to concern about growing numbers of released prisoners with seemingly high recidivism rates, the federal government has sponsored several major initiatives that have led to the implementation of community-level prisoner re-entry projects across the country. In 2001, the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (SVORI) provided $100 million in funding to 69 grantees at 89 U.S. sites. Five years later, the Prisoner Reentry Initiative provided funding to support re-entry programs in more than 30 states and, most recently, the Second Chance Act has generated several rounds of federal funding to aid local and state agencies in the creation and operation of offender re-entry projects.

The presented data herein indicates that CBT programs have proven to be the most effective in reducing prison misconduct. Moreover, these programs, including substance abuse treatment and sex offender treatment, have consistently demonstrated success in decreasing recidivism. CBT programs also tend to yield an impressive ROI. CBT programs had one of the highest ROIs in Aos and Drake’s (2013) cost-benefit analyses. CD treatment in Minnesota, which is delivered within a cognitive-behavioral framework, accounted for approximately 60 percent of the overall cost-avoidance benefits produced by MnDOC programs (Duwe, 2013a). Second, social support interventions have also shown success in decreasing misconduct, reducing recidivism, and producing cost-avoidance benefits but have arguably been underused in U.S. correctional systems. Programming that increases prosocial sources of support warrants greater attention as a correctional intervention, not only because of its demonstrated efficacy in reducing recidivism, but also because of its potential cost effectiveness. Compared with other correctional programs, interventions that focus primarily on increasing social support for offenders are generally less costly to operate. For example, programs such as CoSA and IFI have relatively low operational costs because they rely heavily on volunteers from the community. Similarly, efforts to promote greater visitation in correctional facilities (e.g., revising institutional policies to make them more visitor friendly, implementing video visitation, etc.) are relatively lowcost strategies that could yield significant public safety benefits. As a result of recent research findings, visitation has increasingly been recognized as a way to reduce recidivism but is not yet widely considered to be a “correctional program.” If that were to change, perhaps the RNR framework might be applied to visitation, whereby efforts would be made to provide or locate social support programming for high-risk offenders who have a high “need” for antisocial peers.