Criminal Defense News

Evaluating Evidence For The Effectiveness Of The Reasoning And Rehabilitation Programmed

This article reports on an evaluation of the Reasoning and Rehabilitation (R&R) program, a cognitive-behavioral training program for offenders accredited by the British Home Office for use with offenders serving custodial sentences in England and Wales. 
The R&R program is based in the belief that many offenders reoffend because of deficits in their "social intelligence." In an effort to address this deficit, cognitive-behavioral and educational methods are used to change offenders' thinking patterns linked to their criminal behaviors. R&R is used in 28 prisons in England and Wales. Despite its accreditation and popularity, however, there is evidence that questions its effectiveness in reducing offending. The current evaluation used a quasi-experimental design that involved 105 R&R participants and a control group of 98 offenders referred to the program but who did not attend. Offenders in the comparison group had an offending profile similar to that of program participants. Both groups were at high risk for reoffending. Program participants were assessed as having the thinking styles and attitudes that R&R was designed to change. The findings from this evaluation broadly confirm the findings of other R&R evaluations in showing that the program did not achieve a significant reduction in offending over a 2-year follow-up period. An unexpected finding was that offenders who showed greater pro-social attitude change were more likely to be reconvicted than offenders whose attitudes did not change positively. This casts doubt on the link between attitudes and behavior and the use of measures of attitude change in evaluations. 5 tables and 60 references

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	Did You Know?
	Res Ipsa Loquitur - Literally, "a thing that speaks for itself." In tort law, the doctrine which holds a defendant guilty of negligence without an actual showing that he or she was negligent. Its use is limited in theory to cases in which the cause of the plaintiff's injury was entirely under the control of the defendant, and the injury presumably could have been caused only by negligence.