Dealing with offending behaviour

• Offending behavior can be reduced through four ways: custodial sentencing, behavior modification, anger management, and restorative justice.
• Custodial sentencing involves locking up criminals in prisons or secure facilities like young offenders institutes or psychiatric hospitals.
• The aims of custodial sentences are punishment, protection of society, retribution, and rehabilitation.
• Institutionalization is when an individual adopts the rules and regulations of an institution, such as a prison, after being incarcerated for a long time.
• De-individuation is the sense of losing our individual identity, feeling more a part of the group, and being more likely to copy the group's actions, even violent actions.
• Recidivism is the term for when an offender goes on to commit another crime after being released from prison.
• A large study by the Ministry of Justice followed thousands of prisoners over 18 years and found that 77 percent of ex-inmates eventually went on to reoffend.
• Behavior modification is a way of dealing with offending behavior based on learning, where all behaviors have been learnt through interaction with the environment, including offending behavior.
• Anger management assumes criminal violence is due to emotional responses and these come from irrational thoughts.
• Operant conditioning shows how behavior can be modified with the use of reinforcement and punishment.
• In the skills acquisition stage of anger management, the psychologist teaches techniques like relaxation exercise or communication skills that the offender can use when trying to control that anger.
• Prisoners in a token economy system are given a token for demonstrating target behaviors, which can be traded for rewards.
• The token economy system is limited as it may work in reducing behavioral problems while they're in the controlled setting like a prison, but when the prison is released without the reward system in place behaviors just revert back to criminal behavior.
• The application practice stage of anger management is a role play where the therapist puts the offender in a stressful position that would in the past have led to an aggressive outburst.
• In the cognitive preparation stage of anger management, the offender learns how to reflect on their own thoughts and find what triggers their aggression.
• The three stages of anger management programs are the cognitive preparation stage, skills acquisition, and application practice stage.
• The reoffending rates for short sentences of less than six months were much higher at 84.9 percent than for prisoners who had sentences of four years or more at 32.2 percent.
• Differential association theory suggests that custodial sentencing is counterproductive as it reinforces pro-criminal attitudes by putting criminals together in prisons.
• Restorative justice may not be suitable for all victims as they may not want to accept the process.
• Custodial sentences may not have long-term behavioral changes along with behavior modification but anger management and restorative justice do have longer-term positive effects on personal relationships and lower re-offending rates.
• A holistic combined approach can be used to compare the effects of each approach.
• Many members of society prefer offenders to face long custodial sentences, regardless of the conditions.
• Restorative justice involves a meeting between the offender and victim, mediated by a highly trained mediator, where the victim can explain their experience and the harm that was caused to them, and the offender can explain their story and take responsibility for their actions.
• Restorative justice aims to rehabilitate offenders by making them understand the harm they've caused to their victim, which can lead to a reduction in re-offending.
• Other ways of dealing with offending behavior can be evaluated and suggested as alternatives.
• Restorative justice is cost-effective because of the reduction in re-offending.
• Anger management programs are beneficial for offenders to improve their personal relationships and might even improve their relationships with people at work and help them retain employment.
• The second self-report measure may show a positive outcome due to offenders trying to get early release and improve their personal relationships.
• Anger management and restorative justice require trained staff, which may not be available due to lack of funding.
• The cost of incarcerating a single prisoner in 2020 was £42,000 a year, with recidivism rates so high and prisoners likely to return soon after being released, it should be questioned if there are not more effective and less costly ways of reducing crime.
• Custodial sentences are politically popular as they are seen as a suitable punishment.