"I am under no illusion that prison staff are my friends"
The Current Psychological Approach to Offender Rehabilitation
The current vogue in prisoner rehabilitation, the 'treatment approach,' otherwise the pro-social and cognitive skills training model bases its assumptions that there is a general criminal personality that typifies offender's regardless of race, gender, ethnicity or class. Moreover, that this personality type has been 'identified' through psychological research embracing the scientific method. The results were so called findings that offender's personalities are characterised by cognitive inadequacies or thinking deficits and that these deficits are criminogenic, that is that they are statistically associated with crime.
Social structures and systemic issues, for example, unemployment, sexism. racism, poverty, class and gender for the purpose of assessment are therefore ignored.
Understanding the literature is further complicated in mat many of its claims are highly contestable.
For example, it is frequently claimed that the system is 'objective'. The first point one should make here is that the prison system per sets in no way 'objective'.
Those who end up in prison do so as a result of a long series of decision-making by individuals where subjectivity comes into play at every step of the way - including by members of the public (e.g. by victims about whether to report or not), and by the police (about whether to charge or not) as well as by prosecutors (whether to accept pleas of lesser charges) and by judges, lawyers and juries.
Therefore, what is being studied by penal researchers is not an objective picture of offender, but rather a relatively small sub-group of offenders, predominantly from vulnerable groups in any given society who have been successfully focused on and processed by other components of the criminal justice system.
The claim that these newer assessment 'tools' are also objective is further questionable in that they continue to rely on the mainstay of traditional clinical approaches, namely professional judgement. The actuarial approach which focuses on groups of offenders and statistical calculations, has been deemed to be superior to the individual clinical approach.
Following such a vision, the argument is that computerised forms (mostly of a self-reporting nature by offenders) with relevant items checked off by a technocrat is far superior than, for example, having a socially scientific trained intake officer sitting down with an offender to discuss how they might best proceed through the morass of prison institutions and programmes.
Within HM Prison Service we have just that with the varying ranks of psychologists at the Offending Behaviour Programmes Unit, Prison Service Headquarters checking off forms and assessments and through the use of computers plotting an offender's risk and progress through the prison system.
What is clear is that even with the use of such technologies. Prison Service personnel and psychologists frequently use overrides to adjust risk and assessments to increase or decrease classifications and expectations of the prisoner.
What do these evaluations tell us?
The 1995 Cognitive Skills Evaluation carried out by the Correctional Services of Canada - 'The Impact of Cognitive Skills Training on Post-Release Recidivism Among Canadian Federal Offenders* ( Canada is where the ideas of social and cognitive skills training originated) proclaim the programmes a success, but the actual data make the claim a difficult one to sustain.
What this research reported was that such programmes were ineffective for the under 25 year age group.
What took the researchers by surprise was that the same was also true of the over 40 age group.
Another set of research by The Correctional Service of Canada followed up a total of 2,125 men for one year after their release. Of these subjects, 1,444 had completed the cognitive skills programme, 302 had dropped out of the programme, and 379 were part of the control group of eligible subjects who had not been admitted to the programme. Two key data points gave the researchers problems from the start given their expectations and the theory from which they started. First, there was only a small difference between the recidivism rates (defined as a re-admission for technical violation of parole) of programme completers and the control group, 44.5 per cent of the former returning to prison compared with 50 per cent of the control subjects. This is, as the report states, an 11.2 per cent decrease and therefore important to note, but obviously not the success that had been hoped for. Second, and perhaps more serious, the cognitive skills programme was shown to have had no effect on improving the post-release performance of subjects deemed by the Correctional Services of Canada Statistical Index on Recidivism tool to be at high risk to re-offend. Thus, 57.4 per cent of the high risk subjects in the control group and 56.9 per cent of the participants re-offended within the first year of release. Only those in the low risk category participants re-offended at a lower rate which was not unexpected. No great claims could be made here.
There were indications in the data however that the high risk career criminal types did better when they completed their cognitive skills programme in the community as opposed to a prison setting, leading researchers to suggest 'post-treatment booster sessions - again falling into that consistent medicalised language (jargon) in which offenders are literally 'inoculated' against.
This would imply it seems, that any cognitive skills training has but a short shelf life, if it ever had any shelf life at all.
One must conclude that all things considered, that the research on the cognitive skills programme is 'not a pretty sight* and unlike earlier, more speculative predictions, these data have remained buried in a Government of Canada report, and not touted in the learned journals of academia let alone the popular media.
My concerns as a life sentence prisoner and one who has undergone a cognitive skills programme is that such approaches focuses on people's personalities whilst dismissing structural factors. It individualises crime and pathologises prisoners.
One could ask what is the correct way to mink and who decides? What is pro-social thinking? What is knowledge and does your knowledge count for more than mine?
Those who develop such programmes are likely to be white middle-class men. (Gendreau, Andrews, Bonta, Ross, Porporino, et al). Is it likely therefore that cognitive behavioural research and programmes reflect their norms?
In 2000, Matthews and Pitt argued that the cognitive skills programmes were a genuine, if unfortunate misinterpretation of the research data and a tendency to erroneously equate .."logical thinking" with being law abiding and 'straight thinking' with going straight." and that it was the triumph of slick marketing by criminological entrepreneurs over the messy reality and ambiguity of everyday prison and probation practice.
Given the dishonourable history of experiments around behaviour modification within prisons, we should be particular wary of programmes which attempt to alter people's thinking.
Such programmes sit uncomfortably close to 'brainwashing'.
For example, a whole series of experiments have been carried out in penal institutions involving LSD, ECT and sensory deprivation. The aim was to change the prisoner's thinking patterns and therefore their behaviour.
Cognitive behavioural programme are designed to address criminogenic factors (is not prison a criminogenic factor ?).
These are characteristics which are said to be associated with crime.
Is there not a population at large who have the same deficits but do not offend?
When addressed through programming, the offender is supposed to be less likely to re-offend. 'Criminogenic' factors include the features of deficit thinking, lack of decision making abilities, impulsiveness and the inability to learn from past mistakes.
Often, these 'crimmogenic' factors are referred to as 'needs' or 'risk's because it is maintained that they put the offender at risk of re-offending and are areas in which offenders need programming. Assessments aimed at identifying needs and or/risks are rife with moral and value judgements - family problems, has no hobbies, currently single, has been unemployed, takes unnecessary risks and so forth. Additionally, the focus on recidivism as a measure of programme success and criminogenic need is questionable. Is recidivism determined by actual offences, arrests or convictions.
Is it likely that those who are released from prison do go on to re-offend and do not get caught?
Given the under-reporting of crime figures and that me actual incidence of all crime may well be as much as ten times as that which comes to the attention of the authorities, who is able to say with certainty that those released from custody and in spite of offender programmes may well be re-offending. Is this counted as a success? Additionally, someone may offend less frequently or less seriously. Would this counts as a success were the offender to be fined or be given a community based sentence?
What actually does count given the short lived Home Office follow up research reports and findings of programme effectiveness? For how long should the offender remain conviction free before he or she can be deemed to be a success?
Would such programmes that have the capacity to change one's thinking, to be less impulsive, to 'think out* the consequences of ones actions also have the capability of causing the offender to think out future criminal behaviour in a more organised, calculated, less impulsive and a more fashioned manner?
Is there indeed a casual relationship between the lack of social skills and offending because the co-existence of the two factors does not necessarily demonstrate a casual link, both may be the product of a third factor, for example socio-economic features which in themselves are more clearly identifiable and are most certainly significant throughout prisons and penal institutions?
A direct casual link between moral functioning and criminal behaviour also needs to be established.
Studies of thinking prior to offending show that the criminal is not concerned with moral issues but rather the likelihood of being successful. (Carroll and Weaver 1986).
Further, the assumption of a relationship between moral reasoning, moral values, and behaviour must also be queried. Several well known experiments have shown that people will behave in ways which they believe or know to be wrong. (Asch 1952; Milgram 1963 and of late the televised prisoner-guard experiment).
The fact that someone is not offending, tells us little about their circumstances.
Despite there being no further arrests or convictions, many ex-prisoners continue to live marginally, in conditions of poverty and violence. Thus recidivism tells us nothing about the quality of life of life they lead. Certainly with a re-offending rate for released prisoners being in the region of 60% within two years of release from prison, the figure for young offenders being considerable higher and the fact that the government is committed to a prison's building programme which is geared to the opening of several more establishments, might it not conceivably be argued that if the psychological approach actually impacted on reducing offending behaviour that the government would not be investing in more prisons but actually closing them or are they destined to become the archetypal Clockwork Orange 'brainwashing centres'?
The work in the cognitive skills treatment approach has in the past been accused of being rife with patronising, condescending, arrogant and dehumanising assumptions and comments and seems to me to operate on a basis where the work has rarely been questioned in the understandable rush to try out new ideas.
The cognitive skills approach also ignores social and economic constraints in offender's lives, the poverty and disruption in their families and communities and the discrimination and racism which they might have experienced.
To give priority to such programmes over job-skill training and other approaches implies that the attitudes and thinking patterns of individuals are the root of their re-offending.
The literature on cognitive skills training is very denigrating, identifying people with poor thinking patterns and as inadequate individuals and discounts everything else.
There also remains an assumption that everyone regardless of race, gender or age can be fitted in to the dominant cognitive skills approach with strict adherence to the principles of (treatment) delivery, rigorous testing and evaluation and accreditation to ensure that the master patterns are maintained. In other words the 'one size cap fits all'.
The history of prisons, indeed the criminal justice system is full of brave, indeed arrogant claims and promising programmes and the past is littered with a history of good intentions which ultimately fell by the wayside. With the largest crime and offending rates in Europe, the under-reporting of crime and the highest prison population in Europe and the fact that in attempting to address me crime issues, the present Government has introduced no less than 12 criminal justice Bills in the past five years, surely adds up to an admission of failure to reduce offending. The proposals of becoming 'tough on crime' and 'tough on the causes of crime' appears to have been sacrificed for arguable 'treatment' approaches' when many crimes actually stem from social issues. It is these areas that are being neglected both with the current obsession for cognitive skills and the lack of vision.