Jack Bush - Cognitive Self Change: How Offenders Experience the World and What We Can Do About It

1. Introduction
2. Chapter 03
3. Chapter 04
4. Chapter 05
5. Chapter 06

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

This edition first published 2016
2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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To our children
Deborah and Kalita;
Julia, Angie, Joanna, and Johnny;
Owain and Aneurin
And in memory of Don Andrews

The authors came together to write this book from diverse and distant places. Jack Bush (PhD in philosophy) from Tacoma, Washington, USA, entered the field of correctional treatment in 1973 before widespread acceptance of evidence-based practice, and before the term what works was part of professional parlance. Bushs education in correctional treatment consisted largely of listening to offenders and ex-offenders tell their stories of how they perceived the world. Daryl Harris (doctorates in both clinical psychology and neuropsychology) has pursued a practical career in forensic psychology in Great Britain from his home in Wales. Richard Parker (PhD in criminology) has developed and delivered treatment programs for offenders in Canberra and Sydney, Australia. In a sense and to varying degrees, we all grew up professionally in the blossoming era of evidence-based practice. And each of us experienced frustration in our encounters with the culture of actual forensic practice.

With a background of counseling voluntary and semi-voluntary clients, Parker felt some contradictions in the what works literature. How do you individualize treatment while maintaining program integrity? How do you keep relatively unmotivated high-risk offenders involved in community treatment programs geared more to motivated medium-risk offenders? Parker saw even the most motivated offenders trying hard, but ending up confused and overwhelmed by the large number of skills they were asked to learn.

Harris recalls a warning from the head of security at his first clinical psychology post at a high security hospital in the UK. Do not turn your back on them for a second, the security official counseled, or they will assault you and that will be the end of your war. The comparison of offender treatment with combat, with treatment providers expected to be on their guard and offenders feeling under siege, is abhorrent to the authors and, we believe, clinically futile.

We were frustrated with the adversarial stance of us versus them and the conception of corrections, including correctional treatment, as a kind of war. We found the delivery of treatment within that culture to be a battle within the criminal justice system a battle of the system fighting against itself. We were equally uncomfortable with the clinical notion of criminality as a kind of disease. And we were frustrated (as we believe all practitioners of correctional treatment sometimes are) with the barrier to communication posed by offenders themselves by their attitudes of hostility and non-compliance to authority. And yet, if it is indeed a war between prison authority and offenders, who can blame offenders for vowing not to lose?

Our common backgrounds, diverse as they are, united us behind the major themes of this book. Our understanding of offenders as human beings derives less from statistical outcome studies and more from our personal communication with individual offenders and ex-offenders. Yet we acknowledge and respect the quantitative evidence of what works in this field.

We have each been strongly influenced by the what works literature originated by Canadian researchers, and particularly by Don Andrews. Bush first met Don Andrews on a cocktail cruise on board a boat on Lake Huron in 1988. The cruise was sponsored by a Canadian correctional treatment conference. Andrews was spreading the word about the analyses of correctional treatment outcomes being performed by him and other Canadian researchers. Bush was implementing the Cognitive Self Change program for violent offenders in the American state of Vermont. Cocktails in hand, Bush explained to Andrews why, based on his experience with offenders, it was important to pay attention to the most criminal of offenders (not the easy cases), to pay particular attention to how they think, and to communicate with them in ways that do not lead them to reject our message and us. Andrews explained to Bush the statistical foundations of risk, need, and responsivity. It was a moment of mutual recognition. We were describing the same phenomena from two different points of view, and coming to the same conclusions.

That moment of recognition captures the intent and structure of this book. The authors do not offer an alternative to quantitative science as a way to understand criminal behavior and what to do about it. Rather, we present an additional dimension to that understanding. This is the dimension of human experience, of offenders experience and our own. We believe this aspect of our shared humanity provides a potential key to diminishing the war between us and them, and in some cases to resolving it.