Cognitive Self Change

How Offenders Experience the World and What We Can Do About It

Jack Bush, Daryl M. Harris, Richard J. Parker

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119121435
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Forensic Psychology
• Index: Psychology

COGNITIVE SELF CHANGE

"The consensus amongst the leading researchers in the offender treatment area is that the comprehensive and sophisticated clinical methods the authors have derived for offender treatment are unsurpassed. Indeed, they have formed the basis for what is known as the core correctional practices for reducing anti-social behavior."
Paul Gendreau, Professor Emeritus, University of New Brunswick

"Bush and colleagues' phenomenologically based approach to offender rehabilitation is based explicitly on the stories they have collected from prisoners and probationers and is a welcome contribution to an academic literature that too often obfuscates the actual work involved in delivering help to the hardest to reach in the criminal justice system."
Shadd Maruna, Ph.D., Dean of the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice

Cognitive Self Change presents a practical guide to rehabilitation based on understanding the way individual offenders experience themselves and the world around them at the moment they offend. De-incentivizing criminal behavior and replacing it with self-empowered change are the keys to upending the traditionally antagonistic relationship between criminals and those meant to help them change. The authors, with their experience of working with offenders and implementing rehabilitation programs, have drawn together clinical and academic perspectives on the treatment of high-risk offenders, analyzing current approaches to treatment and the problems encountered in their application.

Cognitive Self Change rejects the traditional dichotomy of control versus treatment, devising instead a strategy that integrates both. Focusing on high-risk and "hard-core" offenders, not just those that are "ready to change, " they discuss why offenders offend, why they are seldom motivated to change, and why they often fail to engage in treatment. This leads to a strategy of communication that teaches offenders a set of skills they can use to change themselves, and that motivates them to do so.

Chapter 1
The Idea of Criminal Thinking

Cognitive-behavioral treatment methods have become the dominant clinical intervention in offending behavior (Gorman, O'Byrne, & Parton, 2006). Such treatment attempts to change offending behavior by changing the thinking of those who offend. It comes in a variety of forms and packages, including cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), delivered by professional therapists, and cognitive skills training delivered by nonprofessionals following highly structured (“scripted”) lesson plans. Our treatment process, Cognitive Self Change, lies within this broad spectrum of cognitive-behavioral treatment, with aspects of both CBT and cognitive skills training. However, our way of thinking about offending behavior and offender thinking – and the effort to change it – is significantly different from mainstream thinking. These differences are what this book is all about.

Historically (that is to say, before cognitive-behavioral treatment methods became “mainstream”), a number of scholars and clinicians looked to criminal thinking as an explanation of criminal behavior. These theorists represented a variety of clinical and academic fields, and a wide variety of theories and perspectives within each of these fields. We briefly review a few of these here, together with several contemporary theorists, as a background and introduction to our own observations and interpretations of criminal thinking. They are not presented in chronological order.

Adler

Alfred Adler (1956) was a psychiatrist and philosopher from the era and tradition of Freud and Jung. Adler worked closely with both Freud and Jung for a time and, like them, his theories went well beyond psychopathology and clinical treatment to embrace a broad spectrum of human life and experience. His theory of “individual psychology” placed “social interest” at the center of a healthy human personality. He defined “social interest” to include both participation in a social community and, more broadly, as a sense of unity with humanity as a whole.

Adler described criminals as “lacking social interest.” While he did not use the language of modern cognitive psychology, his descriptions of criminals are explicitly cognitive.

Criminals look and speak and listen in a different way from other people. They have a private logic, a private intelligence.

Criminals treat themselves as a body of exiles and do not understand how to feel at home with their fellow men. They are suffering from a wrong outlook upon the world, a wrong estimate of their own importance and the importance of other people …

The main features of the criminal’s personality have already been decided by the time he is four or five years old. By that time he has already made those mistakes in his estimate of himself and of the world which we see displayed in his criminal career. From then on it is easy for such a child to deceive himself and intoxicate himself with the feeling that he is neglected. He looks for evidence to prove that his reproach is true. His behavior becomes worse; he is treated with more severity; he finds a confirmation for his belief that he is thwarted and put in a back seat. Because he feels deprived, he begins to steal; he is found out and punished and now he has still more evidence that he is not loved and that other people are his enemies.

Later on, the criminal turns everything which he experiences into a justification for his attitude; and if his experiences do not quite fit into his scheme, he broods on them and licks them into shape until they are more amenable. If a man has the attitude, “Other people misuse me and humiliate me,” he will find plenty of evidence to confirm him. He will be looking for such evidence, and evidence to the contrary will not be noticed (Adler, 1956: 413–414).

Adler’s description of criminals as lacking social interest, together with his premise that social interest is essential to a healthy personality, renders criminals – by definition – to be unhealthy personalities. But Adler did not think of criminals as the victims of a disease. As Adler saw it, no pathological agent or process produces criminals’ lack of social interest. Their condition is not the result of forces beyond their control, but of acts of their own agency.

If you trace back the life of a criminal, you will almost always find that the trouble began in his early family experiences … But it is not the environment itself that counted … There is no compulsion either in environment or heredity. Children of the same family and the same environment can develop in different ways … Heredity and environment contribute something to a child’s development; but we are not so much concerned with what a child brings into the world, or with the experiences he encounters, as with the way he utilizes them … (Adler, 1956: 418)

Several aspects of Adler’s thinking are echoed in later chapters of this book. We are not by any stretch of the imagination “Adlerians,” and, historically, our ideas do not derive directly from those of Adler. We do not accept as a premise Adler’s view that social interest is essential to a healthy personality. (On the contrary, we believe it is important to keep open the questions of whether offending behavior is pathological, and what kind of pathology that might be.) But our own observations of offenders’ thinking (see Chapter 2) are consistent with Adler’s; and Adler’s explanation of offenders’ ways of thinking as being generated by acts of their own agency is akin to our own.

Issues of responsibility, volition, pathology, and causal determinism – as they pertain to offending behavior – are recurring themes throughout this book.

Sutherland

The American criminologist, Edwin Sutherland, offered a sociological view of criminality (Sutherland, 1947). According to Sutherland, criminality is learned through social interactions, and involves learning both (a) techniques of committing crimes, and (b) motives, drives, rationalizations, and attitudes favorable to violation of the law. Sutherland’s views were “socially deterministic” in the sense that he believed that criminal behavior, like other social behavior, is the product of social influence, which he described as “definitions.” A person becomes delinquent¹ when he is exposed to a preponderance of definitions favorable to violation of the law over definitions favorable to the law. Sutherland’s theory, termed “differential association,” has sustained considerable influence in the field of in criminology and in important respects anticipated psychological theories of “social learning.”

Sykes and Matza

Sykes and Matza (1957) accepted Sutherland’s idea that social behavior is learned through a process of social influences, but argued against the idea that delinquency is the product of a “delinquent subculture” with values and norms contrary to those of the dominant society. They argued that delinquents, for the most part, hold to the same values and norms as everybody else, but effectively escape the influence of these conventional norms and values by what they call “neutralizations.” Neutralizations are cognitive processes – beliefs or attitudes – by which offenders neutralize the influence of conventional social values. These include:

• denial of responsibility (“I’m a victim of circumstances beyond my control”);
• denial of harm (“I’m not doing real harm”);
• denial of victim (“They deserved what they got”);
• condemnation of the condemners (“You do worse things”); and
• appeal to higher loyalties (“My friends depend on me”).

They also noted that “some delinquents may be so isolated from the world of conformity that techniques of neutralisation need not be called into play” (1957: 669). Such “isolated” delinquents seem broadly equivalent to those offenders the current authors call “hard-core.”

Bandura

Bandura is a psychologist best known for his theory of social learning (Bandura, 1977). Social learning theory adds “observational” or “vicarious” learning to the classical and operant conditioning of traditional learning theory. Social learning theory states that, in addition to the mechanisms of reward and punishment, people learn to perform behaviors by observing others perform them.

Like Sutherland, Sykes and Matza, Bandura’s theory of social learning renders socially compliant behavior as the natural and normal order of things. We all observe – and according to social learning theory, are inclined to learn from – the behavior of others. How then, to explain socially deviant behavior?

Bandura identified specific cognitive processes that effectively nullify positive social influences. He called these “mechanisms of moral disengagement” (Bandura, 1986). Bandura (2001) identified the following mechanisms:

• moral justification (the action is portrayed as in the service of a higher moral purpose);
• euphemistic labeling (the use of language that makes the action seem more benign);
• advantageous comparison (the action is compared with worse behavior, so it appears trifling by comparison);
• displacement of responsibility (the action is portrayed as being caused by someone else);
• diffusion of responsibility (when the action requires several actors, each actor can minimize their personal responsibility);
• disregard for, or distortion of, consequences (the detrimental effects of one’s actions are minimized or ignored);
• dehumanization (viewing the victim as less than human); and
• attribution of blame (placing blame on the victim or others).

Unlike many theorists, Bandura placed the concept of agency at the center of his theory: “People are sentient, purposive beings. Faced with prescribed task demands, they act mindfully to make desired things happen rather than simply undergo happenings in which situational forces activate their sub personal structures that generate solutions” (2001: 5).

A key factor of agency is that people intend to act in certain ways, they form plans to behave in a particular way in anticipation of achieving a future goal: “People set goals for themselves, anticipate the likely consequences of prospective actions, and select and create courses of action likely to produce desired outcomes and avoid detrimental ones” (Bandura, 2001: 7).

To do so requires an ability to self-reflect, which leads to personal moral standards:

By making self-evaluation conditional on matching personal standards, people give direction to their pursuits and create self-incentives to sustain their efforts for goal attainment. They do things that give them self-...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Idea of Criminal Thinking
• Chapter 2: Offenders Speak their Minds
• Chapter 3: Cognitive–Emotional–Motivational Structure
• Chapter 4: Supportive Authority and the Strategy of Choices
• Chapter 5: Cognitive Self Change
• Chapter 6: Extended Applications of Supportive Authority
• Chapter 7: How We Know
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement