Correctional Management and Administration

What works in corrections?

October 12, 2011

Correctional Management and Administration CRJU 620

Correctional Programs

In the early 1970’s, Robert Martinson’s wrote an essay, which stated, “nothing works” in corrections. This essay reported that few treatment programs reduced recidivism and gave legitimacy to what everyone thought they already knew which was that rehabilitation does not work. Over the years, there have been meta-analysis completed and have shown that many correctional treatment programs are effective in decreasing recidivism. Since the inception of the modern criminal justice system, the overwhelming response to the questions of what to do with lawbreakers has been to change them into law abiders, by rehabilitating them. The results created by Martinson’s “nothing works” essay was a much more punitive environment that caused individuals to believe in deterrence and incapacitation as were better than treatment as the guiding correctional philosophy. Rehabilitation should be reaffirmed as a goal of the correctional system (Cullen & Gendreau, 2000).

One of the problems with crime is that everyone is an expert. From the politician to the caseworker, everyone believes they have the answer as to how to deal with offenders and what we need to do to straighten them out. The problem with that is there is a lack of credentials held by individuals or agencies. There is little to no staff training on the skills needed to change offender behavior (Lateesa, 2004). The lack of training for human service workers, the use of less effective treatment modalities, the failure to develop and utilize well- designed and comprehensive treatment manuals, and the failure to monitor therapeutic integrity are not inherent in correctional rehabilitation but are due to policy decisions (Cullen & Gendreau, 2000).

A meta-analysis is defined as a statistical aggregation of the results from a large collection of independent studies for the purposes of integrating the findings. The results from each of these studies are converted into a common metric, termed an effect size, to enable cross-study comparison. The ability of meta-analytic techniques to aggregate systematically and compare the findings across several studies