Prisoners’ motivations for therapeutic community treatment
| Date | 01 June 2013 |
| Author | Alisa Stevens |
| Published date | 01 June 2013 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0264550513478321 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Prisoners’ motivations
for therapeutic
community treatment:
In search of a
‘different’ approach to
offender
rehabilitation
Alisa Stevens
University of Southampton, UK
Abstract
Offenders’ motivations to undertake rehabilitative programmes are underexplored.
Drawing upon semi-ethnographic research, this article considers the reasons why
prisoners apply to join a democratic therapeutic community. It identifies a typology
of motivation to participate, and determines that most applicants are seeking
an alternative to the rehabilitative hegemony of structured, manualized, cognitive-
behavioural interventions. The findings have important implications for correctional
staff, and in particular, offender managers, who are best placed to identify and
encourage suitable offenders to apply for admission.
Keywords
motivation, offending behaviour programmes, prison, rehabilitation, therapeutic
community
Introduction
For three decades, researchers have toiled to establish ‘what works’ to reduce or
eliminate re-offending and in which optimal conditions (Andrews and Bonta, 1994;
Corresponding Author:
Alisa Stevens,University of Southampton, MurrayBuilding, Room 4037, Highfield, Southampton, SO17 1BJ.
Email: alisa.stevens@soton.ac.uk
The Journal of Community and Criminal Justice
Probation Journal
60(2) 152–167
ªThe Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0264550513478321
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McGuire, 1995, 2002). Forty three offending behaviour programmes (OBPs),
informed by this research, have been accredited for use in the probation and prison
services of England and Wales (Ministry of Justice, 2010); and static risk algo-
rithms, technical assessment tools, and an extensive literature guide for correctional
staff have been introduced in efforts to gauge offenders’ motivation, suitability, and
treatment readiness for specific OBPs (inter alia, McMurran, 2002; Ward et al.,
2004).
Yet, for all this research activity, the motivation – or modifiable, interactional
‘moving force’ – of the serious offender to enter into and continue with an OBP
(Drieschner et al., 2004; Lo
´pez-Viets et al., 2002) has been overlooked. The
assumption appears to be that either offenders do want to ‘reform’, and if not,
should, and can be ‘helped’ to, want to ‘reform’ most obviously, through the tech-
niques of motivational interviewing (Miller and Rollnick, 1991) and awareness of
the stages of behavioural change (Prochaska and DiClemente, 1984) or more
instrumentally, must ‘reform’ by ‘doing courses’, if they hope to be released early
from a significant but determinate (time-limited) sentence or at all from an indetermi-
nate (life) sentence. Rarely have offenders themselves been asked why they agreed
to participate in a specific rehabilitative intervention, with most scholars more inter-
ested in the effect or importance of motivation on completion and treatment
outcomes (for example, Gideon, 2010; McMurran and McCulloch, 2007; Terry
and Mitchell, 2001; cf. Hudson, 2005).
This article accordingly engages with the neglected issue of prisoner motivation
by presenting a qualitative case study of offender-initiated applications to one
particular – and distinctly ‘different’ – rehabilitative programme: the prison-based
democratic therapeutic community (TC). It begins with a necessarilybrief description
of offending behaviour programmes, the TC alternative, and the research project on
which this article is based. A typology of motivation is then presented which reveals
very variable degrees of commitment to the TC at the time of application for admis-
sion, but an almost uniform dissatisfaction with the ‘standard’, ‘normal’ (cognitive-
behavioural)OBPs which now monopolizecorrectional rehabilitationin ‘mainstream’
(‘system’) prisons. The implications of these findings are then explored.
Offending behaviour programmes and the TC model
Central to contemporary approaches to offender rehabilitation is the provision of
structured, cognitive-behavioural programmes, in the community or in custody,
intended to help individuals recognize and overcome the factors and tendencies
which contribute to their offending. These programmes, which may target general
criminal behaviour, substance misuse, or violent or sexually violent offending,
assume that thoughts affect behaviour (hence cognitive-behavioural, to denote the
theoretical synthesis of these traditions) and that rational individuals have the capa-
bility to monitor and modify their thoughts and behaviours. Offenders, generally
working in groups of eight to twelve and facilitated by specially trained staff,
complete a schedule of treatment modules or ‘blocks’ over a specified number of ses-
sions or weeks, which systematically seek to replace rigid, dysfunctional thinking
Stevens 153
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