Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
Forensic Psychology For Dummies (123 page)
Companions, such as friends and criminal associates.
Modifying behaviour
Some approaches – known as
behaviour modification –
sought to change prisoners’ actions directly.
They were very fashionable in the 1960s and derived from the idea that human and animal behaviour is directly shaped by the associated pattern of rewards and punishments.The idea involved providing or withdrawing rewards for acceptable behaviour. For example, a prisoner was given access to the prison gym or store only if he had no disciplinary violations over a given time period.
Although some such programmes produced initial successes, they eventually lost favour, mainly because they produced no long-term benefit. People behaved well for the rewards but after they were withdrawn their actions reverted to earlier patterns.
The great mistake of the behaviour modification approach was to forget that human beings, unlike animals, can think about their actions and their implications. They make sense of what’s happening and use that to guide how they behave. Although most people are aware of this every day, sad to say it took psychological experiments to convince psychologists. One benefit, however, was that this awareness gave rise to a therapy that combines actions with thoughts – cognitive behavioural therapy.
Getting people together
Much of the therapeutic work in prisons is carried out in groups, typically of 6 to 12 individuals. The purpose of such group work is to enhance the power of therapy by enabling people to share experiences and to learn from each other’s attempts to deal with their problems.
For people who have difficulty relating to and trusting others, which is a common problem for inmates, as I describe in the earlier section ‘Asking whether prison can make people worse’, such group sessions can be very demanding and, if managed properly, have a powerful effect. They’re also much more cost-effective to run than one-to-one therapeutic sessions.
Using cognitive behavioural methods
Cognitive behavioural therapy
(CBT) focuses on challenging unwanted thinking patterns and emotional and behavioural reactions that are learned over a long period of time. The aim is to identify the thinking that causes unhelpful or unproductive feelings and behaviours and discover how to replace them with more positive ones. CBT helps prisoners to make sense of potentially destructive experiences by breaking them down into smaller parts, as follows:
• Thoughts
• Emotions
• Physical feelings
Each area affects the others. How an offender thinks about a problem can influence how he feels and also alter what he does about it.
Figure 13-1 shows how different thoughts, feelings and actions feed on each other producing a positive, productive circle or a negative, destructive one.
Figure 13-1:
The cycle of thoughts, feelings and actions that is dealt with in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.