Introduction
Cognitive Behavioral Interventions are approaches that use soft instruments to correct or enhance behavioral characteristics of individuals, either to comply with society expectations or to unlearn a particular behavior. A person with a drugs problem may be trained to handle the urges of taking drugs and avoidance of risky situations, with an aim of solving the problems. Cognitive behavioral therapy, commonly referred to as CBT, teaches the subjects a new set of skills designed to increase awareness of thoughts and emotions of an individual. The idea is to re-empower the individual to understand how certain exposures to situations, people or thoughts can affect someone’s emotions and feelings. That ability to influence feelings and emotions, when utilized positively, can be helpful in preventing recidivism and reducing the number of incarcerated people in prisons and correction centers (Cully & Teten, 2008). The following article will critique an article by Chris Hansen, a Chief Probation Officer in the district of Nevada titled Cognitive Behavior Interventions: Where They Come from and What They Do.
Chris Hansen explores the potential of behavioral interventions as the solution to the increasingly disturbing number of the people incarcerated in the United States. He notes that the United States imprisons more of citizens than any other country in the world, creating both a humanistic problem and a big dent in the fiscal policies of the federal government and other state governments. That fact calls for innovation and a change of mindset on the future of inmates, and the methods that can be used to reduce the number of people in prisons and correction centers. Maintaining prisons (by paying employees, feeding inmates and other expenses) has become very expensive, and, in some cases, financially unbearable. The State of Washington leads the pack in examining the kind of ideas that would overhaul the state of incarceration as well as create a long-term framework that would reduce the cost of expanding prisons and accommodating new prisoners. One of the methods that help in reducing populations of prisons is ensuring that the level of recidivism, the relapse of inmates to their previous state of crime and drugs, is reduced.
Hansen explores the idea of cognitive therapy, citing research that explains the expanse of the field and how it has developed in the last one hundred years. He is also privy to the possibility of the existence of this approach in ancient communities and first century Rome. The idea of cognitive therapy, he notes, is a marriage of sorts between social learning theory, cognitive therapy, and behavioral therapy, emanating from experimental psychology. He perceives behavioral therapy to be the non-scientific idea of psychoanalysis that postulates that human behaviors can be unlearned, mainly because they are as a result of learning processes. Ideally, Chris Hansen is trying to say that, if one can learn a behavior, then he or she can unlearn it too. Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, therefore, is a process of influencing change in individuals that understands the psychological connection between behavior and the thoughts behind it. Cognitive behavior therapy is not singularly focused on the change in behavior, but rather, the overhaul of the thought process leading to the behavior in question.
Chris notes the role that would be played by cognitive behavior therapies in the correction centers, and particularly in reducing recidivism. Offenders are usually individuals with hard formed ideas on truth, approach to blame and an aggravation against change. That means there is no amount of disciplinary efforts that will change their behaviors, and a cognitive approach is necessary for dealing with the roots of the problem. It makes sense that individuals will relapse to crime once they are released because the basic reasons why they entered into crime have not been sorted, considering that individuals do not just wake up one day and do bad things. Some of the underlying factors that make individuals engage in criminal activities include unstable family backgrounds, drugs, strong narcissism and low self-esteem. It means that solving these problems requires interventions at the thought level, for the offenders to gain confidence and be able to make decisions that adhere to society expectation and the law of the land.
While noting the great need for fidelity in carrying out cognitive behavior therapy on offenders, Hansen appreciates the need to construct the therapy programs in a way that does not burden the correction systems with extra costs. It means that the facilitators should come from the internal staff members and that they should receive adequate training in the area of cognitive therapy to be able to deliver good results and change the behaviors of the offenders. Another important factor according to Hansen is the inclusion of homework and takeaway assignments. He notes that such an approach would be instrumental in testing the commitment of the offenders to the programs, noting that a perfect adherence and attempt of the assignments and involvement in the group discussions would be a sign of a commitment to learning and change, from the offenders.
Fortunately, research on the area of cognitive behavior programs has been done extensively, and there is a list of five pre-set programs that would meet all the conditions of low cost and the execution using the staff in correction facilities. One of the programs is the Reasoning and Rehabilitation (R&R), an approach to correction that is laid on the stages of reasoning in individuals. The program aim is to enhance self-control, cognitive style, and interpersonal problem solving, social perspective taking. It means that if the center can influence the cognitive ability of the offenders to a level that enables them to make thoughtful decisions, then the offenders would be wise to avoid falling back to crime once they are released. The other program and perhaps the most popular is the Moral Reconation Therapy (MRT) that aims to enhance the moral behaviors of inmates to make them understand the need to act on other people in the society. MRT pretexts that moral reasoning enables individuals to have a better perspective on other people, a factor that makes them avoid the kind of behaviors that would put them into conflict with other members of the society and the law enforcers.
The other reasons programs include Aggression Replacement Training (ART), Thinking for Change (T4C) and Relapse Prevention theory (RPT). As the titles suggest, the programs are carefully designed to help offenders to change their perspectives and behaviors before being released. The program also targets a change of behaviors among the offenders that would make them coexist with other people in the society and engage in activities that make them useful and economically empowered. The programs have been implemented in places like Hawaii and Nevada, and the results have been rewarding. According to Hansen, the proper implementation of the correction strategies based on cognitive behavior therapy would not only reduce the cost of correcting individuals but also enable corrected individual to fit into the society.
Opinion
The article provides information on the usefulness of CBT in a powerful way, noting that incarceration is not a perfect way to change individuals into good citizens. It is also important that the author is a practitioner in the correction of individuals, and his convictions offer a fresh way to view the prison system. The intensity of the article cuts across academics and practicality, offering it a depth that would be lacking if the writer was a pure academic. CBT, as discussed, is a method that would soften the careers of officers in correction centers, as they shift from forcing inmates to change to constructing relationships with them, a move that would make them feel appreciated and develop their moral and cognitive skills. By dealing the cause of the problem, the article provides an inclination that would restructure the correction system and reduce the number of people prisons in the United States of America.
Despite the effectiveness of the methods proposed by Chris Hansen, the method of implementation does not offer sufficient training to the practitioners to understand the subjects of cognitive and behavior therapy. The facilitators are trained for 30-50 hours, a period that is too short to enable them to grasp the whole dimension of cognitive behavior therapy. While appreciating the need to maintain the costs at the minimum possible levels, it is also imperative to consider that the field of CBT is an expansive section of psychology and that it would be difficult for an individual to master the idea over a forty hour training period. To increase the effectiveness of such a program, the prison system would do with hiring professional psychotherapists to act as project managers and help the officers to understand the concepts of CBT in a pragmatic setting. Such a practice would promote the effectiveness of the program and ensure that graduates of such programs set good examples to fellow offenders. In situations of exceptional performance from offenders, an inclusion of the graduates would also equip the program the credibility it deserves to succeed in the long-term (Dahlen & Johnson, 2010).
The idea of having a CBT program for offenders is highly impressive and promising, but the balance between follow-up (when offenders are released from prison) and avoiding a conflict with the released offenders (especially when they feel that they are excessively monitored) is a very tricky issue (Boxer, Schappell, Middlemass, & Mercado, 2011). First, a reformed individual would want to go back to his normal life completely, without having to deal with the eyes of the police behind his back every time. On the other hand, the correction officers cannot have absolute faith in the CBT program; hence there is a chance that the released offenders will lapse back to criminal behavior. The program should, therefore, establish a structure that enhances communication and an enhanced follow-up that does not serve as a disruption to the lives of the released offenders (Neller & Petris, 2013)
Conclusion
Cognitive Behavior Therapy is a proven approach to correction of behaviors and traits of people, and its introduction to the federal correction system would be very helpful. In most of the cases, making the program ‘offender-centered’ makes it more effective, as it will be a kind of a carefully designed approach to behavior influence. However, as it is the case with any program, the way it is managed would have a great effect on its effectiveness. Ensuring that the facilitators are adequately trained and the offenders are given the opportunity to participate in the learning process by use of homework assignments gives a good indicator of the effectiveness of the program on particular individuals. Most importantly, though, the implementation of a CBT program would reduce the number of incarcerated people in the United States and reduce the cost and financial burden of running prisons.
References
Boxer, P., Schappell, A., Middlemass, K., & Mercado, I. (2011). Cognitive and emotional covariates of violence exposure among former prisoners: Links to antisocial behavior and emotional distress and implications for theory. Aggressive Behavior, 37(5), 465–475. doi:10.1002/ab.20405
Dahlen, K., & Johnson, R. (2010). The humanism is in the details: An insider’s account of humanistic modifications to a cognitive-behavioral treatment program in a maximum- security prison. The Prison Journal, 90(1), 115–135. doi:10.1177/0032885509357722
Neller, D. J., & Petris, G. (2013). Sexually violent predators: Toward reasonable estimates of Recidivism base rates. Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 31(4), 429–443. doi:10.1002/bsl.2072
Cully, J.A., & Teten, A.L. 2008. A Therapist’s Guide to Brief Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Department of Veterans Affairs South Central MIRECC, Houston.
