Offenders In Custody Research Articles

Establishing a sex offender treatment programme within a prison

In 1991 the Prison Service began to develop a programme of treatment for sex offenders in custody. HMP Risley was the first establishment to successfully establish and run the ‘Core Treatment Programme’. This paper examines some of the issues involved in setting up such a programme, which was designed to be implemented by relatively inexperienced staff.

Characteristics of young motor thieves in custody

This paper reports the results of a survey of 538 male inmates of Young Offender Institutions. Various measures of frequency of motor theft in this sample are presented. There is a rapid rise in the apparent frequency as one moves from the simple measure of ‘principal offence in current charge’ (2%) through other measures including past behaviour and self-reports to the figure of 72% who had some motor theft in their background. Motor theft would seem to be part of the general repertoire of behaviour of young offenders in custody. A small sub-group of repetitive motor thieves was compared with the rest of the sample. No differences were found between this group and the remainder of the sample on information about family background, employment or frequency of getting drunk, use of drugs, gambling or the use of video games. They were more likely to have convictions for motor and non-motor theft, though less likely to have a current conviction for violent acquisition, and more likely to have previous youth custody. They had significantly higher scores on Psychoticism and Impulsiveness and a higher report rate in their current sentence.

The Adolescent Alcohol Involvement Scale: some findings with young offenders

The Adolescent Alcohol Involvement Scale (AAIS) has been questioned regarding its reliability, the amount of common variance among items and its clinical usefulness. Previous studies are reviewed and data for 197 South Australian young offenders in custody are presented. The AAIS was found to be a reliable and internally consistent measure of adolescent alcohol use and misuse. A strong general alcohol involvement component on which all items had positive loadings was found. The need for objective measures in work with at-risk populations was highlighted. The AAIS meets this need through a brief yet broad sampling of clinically-relevant behaviours.

The Sex Offender Treatment Programme in Prisons

After a year of planning, training and preparation, the national strategy for the treatment of sex offenders in prisons is being piloted, prior to implementation of the formally evaluated programme later this year. This is the first ever co-ordinated programme devised by the Home Office for offenders in custody and will have significant impact on the work of community teams in throughcare and supervision after release. Monika Sabor, Senior Probation Officer at Usk Prison and YOI Centre, outlines the programme and considers the ethical and practical implications.

Temporary Relief

emporary Release Schemes can be an effective way of giving greater time and resources to young offenders in custody who otherwise are a low priority. The staff of the Lincoln Scheme present their programme's approach.

Social skills training with young offenders in a borstal: An evaluative study

An empirical study of the efficacy of social skills training (SST) with young male offenders in custody was conducted. Two forms of SST, a traditional approach and one with some elements of cognitive behavior modification, were compared with attention-placebo controls (unstructured discussion), a no-training group drawn from those judged suitable for SST, and an unreferred control group drawn from the remainder of the borstal population. A variety of pre- and post-training measures were taken, including a wide range of personality measures, staff ratings of institutional behavior, frequency of institutional discipline reports, and ratings of role-play performance. The two behavioral training groups improved significantly on the behavioral role-play assessment, while the controls did not. Institutional discipline reports also improved for the two behavioral training groups, although a similar improvement also was found for the attention-placebo controls. No other measures differentiated between the experimental groups; nor could any distinctions be drawn between the two forms of behavioral training on any measures. It is suggested that the improvement in behavioral ratings may have been a function of familiarity with role-play, and, therefore, the only positive training effect — improvement in institutional discipline — can be attributed to an attention component. A number of explanations are offered for the lack of generalization of the training effects: It is further suggested that the cognitive training may have been particularly sensitive to a number of inhibiting factors. Finally, several suggestions for future experimentation and training strategies are made.

Suicidal behavior among serious juvenile offenders.

Seventy-one incarcerated juvenile offenders were diagnosed according to DSM-III and assessed for suicidal behavior. Subjects diagnosed as having major affective disorders or borderline personality disorders showed the highest degree of suicidal tendency and had made the most serious attempts.