During the War for Southern Independence, the main Federal Army was twice headed by George McClellan. During both tenures, he had overwhelming numbers and logistics and twice failed to win. At Antietam, McClellan even had the battle orders of the Southern Army and didn’t know what to do. Like the overwhelming majority of practitioners in the social services, McClellan could do it until he had to. The outcomes of his hypothetical battles were successful because of his theories; the outcomes of his real battles were unsuccessful because of his theories. McClellan was a glib talker.
Rehabilitation of criminals, as you will not find surprising, faces the same problems as George McClellan, who, by his own reports had very high self-esteem and self-confidence and maintained he was a great general even after his defeats. Social services people talk a good and reasonable game full of confidence and self-praise when their work is data-free. When they have to produce, we find them absent without leave. Rhetoric replaces results, fictional accounts predominate and most rehabilitation practices are ineffective. Worse yet, most rehabilitation practices are never evaluated and are held to be effective on the evidence of isolated "successes" which occur because of the passage of time and would have occurred without any intervention. Behavior changes over time. Sometimes it changes in the direction society wants it to. Most correctional rehabilitation efforts are based on laymen’s notion of psychodynamics and childhood causation. As is the case in all other areas of the social sciences, the most effective techniques are used least and the least effective techniques used most.
The Ideal Prison Rehabilitation Program
The exemplary prison program consists of four parts; 1) The clients would be chosen on the basis of need. Some inmates, although they have long sentences and have committed serious crimes, have very little risk of reoffending and do not need rehabilitation. Social workers, psychiatrists and, alas, most psychologists love to work with these people because they are generally well-spoken, polite and amenable to depth-psychotherapy nonsense. These are the YAVISS clients -young-attractive-verbal-intelligent-socially successful. Working with them is a pleasant waste of time., 2) Social and decision-making skills (sometimes called thinking) would be taught to a high level of fluency so that the most effective response will be made immediately in the situations the inmate will encounter in everyday life, 3) New behaviors would be reinforced by all the people with whom the inmate comes in contact while imprisoned, and 4) A two year follow-up, under supervision, as a rigid condition of probation or parole, would ensure that the released inmate had to apply the skills to his out-of-prison life. This is essentially the program that Larson used, with considerable success, for her high-risk clients from the core of a large American city.
The reasons for these steps are:
1). If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. If it ain’t broke and you try to fix it, you’ll probably break it. Only those with high need will benefit, the others have a low chance of re-offending. People who don’t know any facts, include these offenders in their "treatment programs" (polgrams) and point to them as examples of what good programs can do. The polgrams, of course, have done nothing because the probability of reoffending was low without "treatment".
2). If they aren’t able to do the anti-criminal behaviors fluently in ideal conditions then there’s no reason to believe they will do them when rushed and harried. Teaching to fluency makes the behaviors immediately available.
3). If they aren’t shown how to use the skills outside the learning situation and the skills aren’t reinforced there, there’s no reason to expect the behaviors will occur outside the learning situation.
4). If they aren’t taught how to transfer and required to transfer these skills outside of prison, most of them won’t.
Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
