Dr Richard Parker1
1Corrective Services NSW, Australia
Biography:
Dr Parker is a senior psychologist at Corrective Services NSW, where his work involves assessing high risk sexual and violent offenders for post sentence supervision and detention. He also provides intervention to some of these offenders. Dr Parker has worked with offenders since 1996 in a number of jurisdictions, working with a wide range of offenders. He is author of the book "The Correctional Helicopter" and co-author of the book "Cognitive Self Change".
In response to Martinson's (1974) pessimistic proclamation that efforts at rehabilitation were ineffective, a group of researchers including Andrews, Gendreau, Ross, Bonta and Hoge set out to identify and label the intervention features (called the Principles of Effective Intervention – PEI) that were associated with reductions in recidivism rates.
Using sophisticated methods such as meta-analysis, Andrews (2001) identified 19 principles that were associated with successful rehabilitation. Through the various iterations of their book "The Psychology of Criminal Conduct", Andrews and Bonta have refined these into a list of 15 principles. However, in practice, these are commonly referred to as "RNR", referencing only three of these principles – Risk, Need & Responsivity.
I argue that this briefer version of the PEI results in many jurisdictions ignoring some of the other principles, leading to interventions which are in clear violation of several of the principles, particularly the Human Services principle. In the Academic literature, this has led to many debates, such as the criticisms of Ward, and a broader push away from RNR from some researchers. A particular problem as been the redefining of the Responsivity principle, to the point where different researchers use the word to mean quite different things.
I propose a re-wording of the PEI, eliminating the problematic use of the word responsivity, and replacing it with the components that have been shown to be associated with reduced rates of reoffending. Also, due to overlap between many of the principles, the new list has been shortened to seven principles.