Cognitive Self Change E-Book

Jack Bush

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 374

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

COGNITIVE SELF CHANGE

“The consensus amongst the leading researchers in the offender treatment area is that the comprehensive and sophisticated clinical methods the authors have derived for offender treatment are unsurpassed. Indeed, they have formed the basis for what is known as the core correctional practices for reducing anti-social behavior.”
Paul Gendreau, Professor Emeritus, University of New Brunswick

“Bush and colleagues’ phenomenologically based approach to offender rehabilitation is based explicitly on the stories they have collected from prisoners and probationers and is a welcome contribution to an academic literature that too often obfuscates the actual work involved in delivering help to the hardest to reach in the criminal justice system.”
Shadd Maruna, Ph.D., Dean of the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice

Cognitive Self Change presents a practical guide to rehabilitation based on understanding the way individual offenders experience themselves and the world around them at the moment they offend. De-incentivizing criminal behavior and replacing it with self-empowered change are the keys to upending the traditionally antagonistic relationship between criminals and those meant to help them change. The authors, with their experience of working with offenders and implementing rehabilitation programs, have drawn together clinical and academic perspectives on the treatment of high-risk offenders, analyzing current approaches to treatment and the problems encountered in their application.

Cognitive Self Change rejects the traditional dichotomy of control versus treatment, devising instead a strategy that integrates both. Focusing on high-risk and “hard-core” offenders, not just those that are “ready to change,” they discuss why offenders offend, why they are seldom motivated to change, and why they often fail to engage in treatment. This leads to a strategy of communication that teaches offenders a set of skills they can use to change themselves, and that motivates them to do so.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Understanding Offending Behavior

Hard-Core

Cognitive Self Change

A Human Connection

Phenomenology and Self-reports: Some Preliminary Comments about Method

Summary of Chapters

Chapter 1: The Idea of Criminal Thinking

Ellis, Beck, and Antisocial Schemas

Psychopathology or Irresponsibility

An Alternative Point of View

Chapter 2: Offenders Speak their Minds

Seven Male Offenders

Three Young Women

Three Violent Mental Health Patients

Two Problematic Groups

Three British Gang Members

Conclusions and Interpretations

Chapter 3: Cognitive–Emotional–Motivational Structure

The Idea of Conscious Agency: a Likely Story

Will and Volition, Self and Self-interest

The Model

Basic Outlaw Logic: Learning the Rewards of Criminal Thinking

Variations of Criminal Thinking

Conclusions and Implications

Chapter 4: Supportive Authority and the Strategy of Choices

The Problem of Engagement

Conditions of Communication and Engagement

Supportive Authority

Rethinking Correctional Treatment

The Strategy of Choices

Final Comments

Chapter 5: Cognitive Self Change

Four Basic Steps

Collaboration and the Strategy of Choices

Brief Notes on Program Delivery: Group Size, Duration and Intensity, Facilitator Qualifications and Training

Chapter 6: Extended Applications of Supportive Authority

Why Offenders Need Help

Not Either/Or: Some Promising Examples

The System as the Intervention: Some Recent Examples

Supportive Authority, Revisited

An Idealistic Proposal (with modest expectations)

Chapter 7: How We Know

Introduction

Cognitive Self Change

The Significance of Subjectivity

Science and Subjectivity

Bibliography

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Figure I.1 Cognitive–Emotional–Motivational Structure

Chapter 03

Figure 3.1 Cognitive–Emotional–Motivational Structure

Chapter 04

Figure 4.1 The Voice of Supportive Authority

Figure 4.2 The Elements of Supportive Authority

Chapter 05

Figure 5.1 Circle Diagram

Figure 5.2 A Themes and Patterns Diagram

Chapter 06

Figure 6.1 The Us versus Them Cycle: An Escalating Conflict of Attitudes and Actions

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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Cognitive Self Change

How Offenders Experience the World and What We Can Do About It

Jack Bush, Daryl M. Harris, and Richard J. Parker

This edition first published 2016© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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Hardback ISBN: 9780470974827Paperback ISBN: 9780470974810

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Cover image: GettyImages © skhoward    Shutterstock © James LaurieiStockphoto © Narelle Robson-Petch

   To our children      Deborah and Kalita;       Julia, Angie, Joanna, and Johnny;       Owain and Aneurin   And in memory of Don Andrews

Preface

The authors came together to write this book from diverse and distant places. Jack Bush (PhD in philosophy) from Tacoma, Washington, USA, entered the field of correctional treatment in 1973 – before widespread acceptance of evidence-based practice, and before the term “what works” was part of professional parlance. Bush’s education in correctional treatment consisted largely of listening to offenders and ex-offenders tell their stories of how they perceived the world. Daryl Harris (doctorates in both clinical psychology and neuropsychology) has pursued a practical career in forensic psychology in Great Britain from his home in Wales. Richard Parker (PhD in criminology) has developed and delivered treatment programs for offenders in Canberra and Sydney, Australia. In a sense and to varying degrees, we all grew up professionally in the blossoming era of evidence-based practice. And each of us experienced frustration in our encounters with the culture of actual forensic practice.

With a background of counseling voluntary and semi-voluntary clients, Parker felt some contradictions in the “what works” literature. How do you individualize treatment while maintaining program integrity? How do you keep relatively unmotivated high-risk offenders involved in community treatment programs geared more to motivated medium-risk offenders? Parker saw even the most motivated offenders trying hard, but ending up confused and overwhelmed by the large number of skills they were asked to learn.

Harris recalls a warning from the head of security at his first clinical psychology post at a high security hospital in the UK. Do not turn your back on “them” for a second, the security official counseled, or they will assault you – and that will be the end of “your war.” The comparison of offender treatment with combat, with treatment providers expected to be on their guard and offenders feeling under siege, is abhorrent to the authors and, we believe, clinically futile.

We were frustrated with the adversarial stance of “us versus them” and the conception of corrections, including correctional treatment, as a kind of war. We found the delivery of treatment within that culture to be a battle within the criminal justice system – a battle of the system fighting against itself. We were equally uncomfortable with the clinical notion of criminality as a kind of disease. And we were frustrated (as we believe all practitioners of correctional treatment sometimes are) with the barrier to communication posed by offenders themselves by their attitudes of hostility and non-compliance to authority. And yet, if it is indeed a war between prison authority and offenders, who can blame offenders for vowing not to lose?

Our common backgrounds, diverse as they are, united us behind the major themes of this book. Our understanding of offenders as human beings derives less from statistical outcome studies and more from our personal communication with individual offenders and ex-offenders. Yet we acknowledge and respect the quantitative evidence of what works in this field.

We have each been strongly influenced by the “what works” literature originated by Canadian researchers, and particularly by Don Andrews. Bush first met Don Andrews on a cocktail cruise on board a boat on Lake Huron in 1988. The cruise was sponsored by a Canadian correctional treatment conference. Andrews was spreading the word about the analyses of correctional treatment outcomes being performed by him and other Canadian researchers. Bush was implementing the Cognitive Self Change program for violent offenders in the American state of Vermont. Cocktails in hand, Bush explained to Andrews why, based on his experience with offenders, it was important to pay attention to the most criminal of offenders (not the “easy cases”), to pay particular attention to how they think, and to communicate with them in ways that do not lead them to reject our message – and us. Andrews explained to Bush the statistical foundations of risk, need, and responsivity. It was a moment of mutual recognition. We were describing the same phenomena from two different points of view, and coming to the same conclusions.

That moment of recognition captures the intent and structure of this book. The authors do not offer an alternative to quantitative science as a way to understand criminal behavior and what to do about it. Rather, we present an additional dimension to that understanding. This is the dimension of human experience, of offenders’ experience and our own. We believe this aspect of our shared humanity provides a potential key to diminishing the war between us and them, and in some cases to resolving it.

Acknowledgements

We want to thank all those that helped this book come about.

Jack says: I want to thank those who have supported my ideas and my programs over the past many years. In particular, I thank my long time friend and boss at the Correctional Treatment Program in Oregon, Roger Smith; my friends and colleagues in Vermont who nurtured and delivered and improved the Cognitive Self Change program, and especially Brian Bilodeau, Thomas Powell, Charles Gurney, Steve Woodsum, Renee Weeks, and Richard Powell. Above all, I thank my best friend and lover, wife, life companion, and writing coach: Susan F. Brink. Thank you, Susie.

Richard says: I would like to thank the former Executive Director of ACT Corrective Services, James Ryan, for showing faith and having the courage to bring the Cognitive Self Change program to Australia; and the numerous CSC facilitators who have vindicated my faith in the ability of this program to reach out to a wide array of often difficult offenders; and my wife, Marlene, who has been with me through this incredible journey.

Daryl says: I would like to say thanks to anyone who has shown faith in me or taken the time wittingly or unwittingly to help me learn – principally my parents (Pat and Alan), brother (Richard), friends, colleagues, offenders, patients, teachers (especially Chris Penford, Richard Harvey, and Dave Golder), lecturers (especially Janice Kay, Denver Daniels, and Sean Hammond), and my co-authors, but most of all Sarah my wife and my children Owain and Aneurin.

Introduction

In this introduction the authors offer a brief description of their premises and presuppositions, particularly as these differ from traditional or “mainstream” ways of thinking in the field of correctional treatment. We sketch and briefly summarize how our experience with offenders points us to the main conclusions of this book. This Introduction is presented in six sections.

Understanding Offending Behavior

On the face of it, criminal behavior appears easy to understand. Selfish disregard for other people seems to be a normal human trait. It is easy to imagine that most of us would be this way most of the time if we were not so well brought up, or if there were no laws, or if laws were not enforced. However, on a closer look, criminal behavior is not so simple. The most persistent offenders seem to be immune to caring about the harm they do to others. Law enforcement and punishment seem not to deter them. They seem perversely determined to be as they are, and to stay that way. Something more than “normal human selfishness” is going on here. But what is it?