Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as a Means to Treat Inmates and Reduce Recidivism
In today’s blog post, I want to focus on what rehabilitative practices can be used to lower rates of crime and recidivism. This is a black-hole of a topic. There is endless research, routes to be taken, and opinions. With that said, this blog post will be focusing on Cognitive Behavioral Interventions. These programs are believed to be helpful in reducing recidivism by targeting the thinking process. While this treatment does not focus on tackling traditional diagnostic mental illnesses, it does focus on treating mental processes that are abnormal or not fully developed that are commonly found in the prison population. This includes mental process and personality characteristics such as impulsivity, lack of self-control, danger/defiance, and weak problem solving and coping skills. Furthermore, in my opinion, this form of rehabilitation does aim on bettering mental health by improving mental reasoning. However, it should be noted that this form of therapy is not substantial enough to help those with diagnosed mental illnesses as such a population needs specialized around the clock care and medication.
I will begin by addressing why there is a need for CBT, then explaining what it is and how it addresses these needs, the effectiveness CBT has on recidivism, implementing CBT, and needs in future research. It should be noted that CBT is referred to as both Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Interventions. I will be using the terms interchangeably but both with abbreviated as (CBT)
So, why is there a need for Cognitive Behavioral Interventions?
Easton & Visher (2021) conducted a research study about changing prisons and the criminal justice system to help change people. They explain that a lot of offenders of crime struggle with thinking patterns that bring unwanted or negative behaviors. They have personality characteristic and mental processing issues such as struggles with emotional regulation or issues with problem-solving/coping skills. Furthermore, a successful way to rehabilitate these offenders would be to change the way that they think and their mental process. This is what CBT aims to do (but I will explain more on that later).
Another important factor to consider during rehabilitation is the fact that oftentimes offenders, especially offenders of violent crimes, were offenders previously victims of crimes. This complicates the binary categories of victim or offender that we have as a society. We need to move beyond this binary categorization when treating people in order to get to the root of the problem. This includes addressing mental processes that may have developed through these experiences. Additionally, being sentenced and incarcerated can be traumatic and exacerbate these mental issues. They have to adjust to being away from friends and family, do not have a support system, and oftentimes lose their self-worth and identity. They found that for the most part, people want to get back on their feet and their main motivation tends to be personal relationships. But, it is hard to maintain these relationships while incarcerated. To make matters even worse, incarceration often causes inmates to lose faith in relationships because of the prison environment: mistrust, suspicion, and absence of empathy. Furthermore, it is important to address the mental issues that stem from life experiences and take steps to prevent these mental blocks and processing mistakes from being exacerbated from the environment of the prison. And, you guessed it, CBT can help with this issue by once again aiming to change the way they think.
What is CBT?
Now that you have an understanding of the mental issues and thinking patterns that most criminals have (such as antisocial behaviors, impulsivity, lack of self-control, issues with problem solving and coping skills), you can better understand how CBT works. It is believed that CBT can provide a successful path for reintegration because it focuses on changing these thinking patterns.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a psycho-social intervention in that it focuses on improving both psychological processes and social factors. It helps people learn how to identify and change destructive or disturbing thought patterns that have a negative influence on their behavior or emotions. It challenges and changes these unhelpful cognitive thoughts and behaviors, helps improve emotional regulation (anger management), and works on developing personal coping strategies that target current problems. In other words, CBT helps people identify negative thoughts and helps people practice coping skills and problem-solving skills to use in real-world situations. This is achieved by reinforcing pro-social attitudes, use of role-play, use of rewards and punishments, graduated rehearsals and practices, and appropriate modeling that introduces pro-social coping strategies by allowing offenders to learn in structured group formats (amongst other things)
Effectiveness of CBT
The National Institute of Corrections has a website detailing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that I highly recommend exploring. It talks about CBT with different populations, program evaluations, and effectiveness. One of their articles is a study done by Lizama et al. (2014) that examined short-term in-custody treatment programs such as CBT. They state that there are several different types of CBT, but they specifically examine three: Moral Reconation Therapy, Reasoning and Rehabilitation, and Thinking for a Change. Below is a chart that states what each CBT program is, the curriculum, and the recidivism effects:
As you can see in the chart, all of the CBT programs reduced recidivism rates (although they are not perfect and there is clearly room to improve). I would highly recommend reading the full article as it also talkings about other forms of rehabilitations such as education and vocational programs and alcohol and substances abuse rehabilitation programs.
Implementing CBT
All California Department of correction and Rehabilitation centers offer Cognitive Behavioral Interventions. Now, California is a more liberal state and puts more funding into rehabilitation than other more conservative states. This brings up the big issue: implementing CBT is expensive. A lot of people feel that we should not be putting money into these criminals. And, at the end of the day, we already spend too much money on the prison system due to over incarceration (amongst other things, in my opinion). However, research shows that implementing rehabilitative services and CBT may be cost effective in the long run as it will decrease rates of crimes and recidivism.
Future Research
As I stated in the beginning, CBT is not recommended for those with diagnosed mental illnesses. Mentally ill inmates require around the clock attention, medication, and many other needs. They pose a different threat than typical inmates as they are not only dangers to public, but to themselves as well; They have higher suicide rates than the average prison population. There is a pressing issue in modern days as there is a growing rate of incarceration of mentally ill individuals that find themselves placed in insufficient facilities that do not meet their needs. There needs to be more research conducted on effective (and cost-effective) ways of treating the mentally ill that are incarcerated. One promising strategy is to create a modified therapeutic community (a self-help and community based program). Inmates live n their own separate residential units and attend group based therapy that help inmates stabilize their personality disorders and interpersonal problems. One study (referenced in Lizama et al. (2014)) found that the average therapeutic community can reduce recidivism by 5.3%. But, overall, there needs to be more research on effective methods for the mentally ill.
Additionally, there needs to be more research on the effectiveness of these programs. If the programs are ineffective, then we can work to improve them. Once they are effective, the positive effects could justify the cost.
Overall, CBT seems to be a promising method for rehabilitating inmates to reduce rates of crime and recidivism. By working to change the mental processes of the inmates, they can prevent the negative mental thoughts that led to their previous crimes. Additionally, practicing applying these new mental processes in real-world situations can help them think about how to actually apply what they are learning so it can be used once they are released. This is a hefty topic, and there are many other rehabilitative services that have proven to be effective. But, CBT does seem to be one of the most prominent methods in research.
That’s all for this week,
Peace ✌️
Sheridan