CRIMINOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY
The academic relationship between criminology and psychology has not always been harmonious (Hollin, 2002a). Studies of the first criminologists, in the late 1800s, focused on the individual offender, and it was hard to distinguish between criminologists and psychologists. In the 1930s, the focus in mainstream criminology shifted from the individual to society, and psychological theories of criminal behaviour held little sway compared to sociological theories. But since the 1990s, there has been an increasing dialogue between the disciplines as the study of the individual once again becomes a concern in criminology (Lilly, Cullen & Ball, 2001).
THE CAMBRIDGE STUDY - Predicting delinquency
One of the main findings from longitudinal research is that most juvenile crime is ‘adolescence limited’. [longitudinal research type of research design in which data are collected from a group of people, termed a cohort, over a long period of time (typically decades)] In other words, most young offenders ‘grow out’ of crime by the time they are 18 (Moffitt, 1993). But some juveniles (called ‘life-course persistent’ offenders) will continue offending into adulthood (Moffitt, 1993). Developmental criminology attempts to identify the factors that predict longer-term offending, in turn contributing to preventative efforts.
The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development is an extensive longitudinal study conducted in Great Britain that has generated a wealth of data (Farrington, 2002). [Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development longitudinal study, based at the University of Cambridge, concerned with the development of delinquency and later adult crime] It began in 1961 with a cohort of 411 boys aged eight and nine, and it is still in progress, with over 90 per cent of the sample still alive. The methodology used in the Cambridge Study has involved not only access to official records, but also repeated testing and interviewing of the participants, as well as their parents, peers and schoolteachers. Approximately 20 per cent of the young men involved in the survey were convicted as juveniles, a figure that grew to 40 per cent convicted (excluding minor crimes) by 40 years of age. The official convictions matched reasonably well with self-reported delinquency.
By comparing the worst offenders with the remainder of the cohort, predictive factors began to emerge. These are factors evident during childhood and adolescence that have predictive value with respect to behaviour in later life. The Cambridge Study strongly suggests that the intensity and severity of certain adverse features in early life predict the onset of antisocial behaviour and later criminal behaviour.
Farrington (2002) lists these predictive factors as follows:
1. antisocial behaviour, including troublesomeness in school, dishonesty and aggressiveness;
2. hyperactivity–impulsivity–attention deficit, including poor concentration, restlessness and risk-taking;
3. low intelligence and poor school attainment;
4. family criminality as seen in parents and older siblings;
5. family poverty in terms of low family income, poor housing and large family size; and
6. harsh parenting style, lack of parental supervision, parental conflict and separation from parents.
Other studies have found similar predictors for aggression and violent conduct (Kingston & Prior, 1995). It is also evident that childhood antisocial behaviour and adolescent delinquency are related to other developmental problems. Stattin and Magnusson (1995) found clear relationships between the onset of official delinquency and other educational, behavioural and interpersonal problems. Farrington, Barnes and Lambert (1996) showed that these developmental problems are frequently concentrated in specific families. In their sample of 397 families, half the total convictions in the whole sample were accounted for by 23 families!
The force of the Cambridge Study and other similar research is to suggest that we need prevention strategies to reduce child and adolescent antisocial behaviour (Farrington, 2002). Such strategies might include improving young people’s school achievement and interpersonal skills, improving child-rearing practice and reducing poverty and social exclusion.
[David P. Farrington (1944– ) is currently Professor of Psychological Criminology at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge. A prolific researcher, he is widely cited for his work (initially with Donald West) on the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development. He has also published on a range of other topics, including shoplifting, bullying, crime prevention, and methodologies for evaluating criminological interventions. He has the distinction of being the first non-American President of the American Society of Criminology. He is a former chair of The British Psychological Society’s Division of Criminological and Legal Psychology.]
Adult criminals
A longitudinal study allows us to compare adult offenders and non-offenders to discover even more about the pathways to crime. When the cohort in the Cambridge Study reached the age of 18, the chronic offenders had a lifestyle characterized by heavy drinking, sexual promiscuity, drug use and minor crimes (mostly car theft, group violence and vandalism). They were highly unlikely to have any formal qualifications, they held unskilled manual jobs, and had had frequent periods of unemployment. By 32 years of age, the chronic offenders were unlikely to be home-owners, had low-paid jobs, were likely to have physically assaulted their partner, and used a wide range of drugs. As you might expect, they had an extensive history of fines, probation orders and prison sentences. It was clear from their life histories and current circumstances that these men were leading a bleak and socially dysfunctional existence.
The data also point to protective factors. These are factors that appear to balance the negative predictors, so that at times when you would expect offending to occur, it does not. When males show all the predictive signs for a criminal career and yet do not commit offences, Farrington and West (1990) label them ‘good boys from bad backgrounds’. These men were generally shy during adolescence and socially withdrawn as adults. While not involved in crime, they did experience relationship problems with their parents or partners. Forming close relationships in early adulthood also seems to be related to a decrease in offending. In particular, those offenders who married showed a decrease in offending – providing that their partner was not a convicted offender (Farrington & West, 1995).
It would be a mistake to try to construct an exact model of a criminal career from all these data. There are too many unanswered questions for us to be overly confident in predicting the outcome, and simply describing the predictive factors is not the same as explaining how they bring about delinquent behaviour. Thus far, there is no grand theory to explain how the interaction between a young person and his or her environmental circumstances culminates in criminality. However, there are enough positive developments in the extant literature to indicate that this might be feasible in the future, at least with respect to certain probabilities and confidence limits.
VIOLENT OFFENDERS
Criminal behaviour takes many forms, but there is little doubt that violent acts are a source of great public concern. A recent World Health Report (Krug et al., 2002) referred to violence as ‘a global public health problem’. Contemporary psychological theory characterizes violence in this context in terms of an interaction between the qualities of the individual and characteristics of their environment.
The development of violent behaviour
As with delinquency, the development of violent behaviour can be studied over the lifespan, leading to the formulation of complex models of violent conduct. Nietzel, Hasemann and Lynam (1999) developed a model based on four sequential stages across the lifespan. This is an excellent example of an attempt to integrate social, environmental and individual factors to characterize the key factors underlying violence. At the first stage, there are distal antecedents to violence. These are divided into biological precursors (including genetic transmission and lability of the autonomic nervous system – psychological predispositions (including impulsivity and deficient problem solving) and environmental factors (such as family functioning and the social fabric of the neighbourhood). At the second stage, there are early indicators of violence as the child develops, such as conduct disorder and poor emotional regulation. Third, as the child matures the developmental processes associated with the intensification of vio lent behaviour come into effect, including school failure, association with delinquent peers, and substance abuse.
Finally, as the adolescent moves into adulthood there is a stage at which maintenance variables come into force, including continued reinforcement for violent conduct, association with criminal peers, and social conditions that provide opportunities for crime.
A psychological profile of violence
Research has also begun to uncover some of the psychological processes characteristic of the violent person. For example, the influential work of Dodge and colleagues has drawn on social information processing [social information processing theoretical model of how we perceive and understand the words and actions of other people] (i.e. how we perceive and understand and the words and actions of other people) to seek to understand the psychology of violence. Crick and Dodge (1994; Dodge 1997) suggested that we follow a sequence of steps when we process social information:
1 encoding social cues
2 making sense of these cues
3 a cognitive search for the appropriate response
4 deciding on the best option for making a response
5 making a response
Dodge proposed that violent behaviour may result from deficits and biases at any of these stages.
Beginning with social perception, there is evidence that aggressive young people search for and encode fewer social cues than their non-aggressive peers (Dodge & Newman, 1981) and pay more attention to cues at the end of an interaction (Crick & Dodge, 1994). This misperception may in turn lead to misattribution of intent, so that the actions of other people are mistakenly seen as hostile or threatening (Akhtar & Bradley, 1991; Crick & Dodge, 1996). Working out how best to respond to a situation is a cognitive ability often referred to as social problem solving. It involves generating feasible courses of action, considering potential alternatives and their likely consequences, and making plans for achieving the desired outcome (Spivack, Platt & Shure, 1976). Studies suggest that violent people show restricted problemsolving ability and consider fewer consequences than non-violent people (Slaby & Guerra, 1988). This sequence of cognitive events culminates in violent behaviour, which the violent person may view as an acceptable, legitimate form of conduct (Slaby & Guerra, 1988).
The role of anger
Cognitions interact with emotions, and anger (particularly dysfunctional anger) is the emotional state most frequently associated with violent behaviour (Blackburn, 1993). Anger may be said to be dysfunctional when it has significantly negative consequences for the individual or for other people (Swaffer & Hollin, 2001). It would be wrong to say that anger is the principal cause of violence, or that all violent offenders are angry, but clearly it is a consideration in understanding violence.
Currently, the most influential theory of anger is Novaco’s (1975). According to Novaco, for someone to become angry, an environmental event must first trigger distinctive patterns of physiological and cognitive arousal. This trigger usually lies in the individual’s perception of the words and actions of another person.
When we become angry, physiological and cognitive processes are kicked into action. Increased autonomic nervous system activity includes a rise in body temperature, perspiration, muscular tension and increased cardiovascular activity. The relevant cognitive processes (Novaco & Welsh, 1989) involve various types of information-processing biases concerned with the encoding of interpretation and triggering cues. For example, attentional cueing is the tendency to see hostility and provocation in the words and actions of other people, while an attribution error occurs when the individual believes that his or her own behaviour is determined by the situation, but that the behaviour of other people is explained by their personality. The progression from anger to violence is associated with the disinhibition of internal control, which can result from factors such as high levels of physiological arousal, the perception that there is little chance of being apprehended or punished, and the perpetrator’s use of drugs or alcohol.
Moral reasoning
There is a long history of research into the relationship between moral reasoning and offending (Palmer, 2003). Gibbs has examined the specific association between moral reasoning and violent behaviour, focusing on the bridge between theories of social information processing and moral development. Gibbs and colleagues suggest that this bridge takes the form of cognitive distortions (Gibbs, 1993; Goldstein, Glick & Gibbs, 1998) by which we rationalize or mislabel our own behaviour.
For example, if I perceive someone else’s actions as having hostile intent, leading me to assault them, my distorted rationalization might be that ‘he was asking for it’. Cognitive distortion is also seen in my biased interpretation of the consequences of my behaviour. So I might say that my victim ‘could have had it worse’ or ‘wasn’t too badly hurt’ or that ‘no real damage was done’ (Gibbs, 1996). These powerful types of distorted thinking are often socially supported and reinforced by the offender’s peer group.
The effectiveness of rehabilitation - A research issue
Historically, there is a longstanding struggle between liberal proponents of rehabilitation of offenders and conservative advocates of punishment for those who commit crimes. While this debate operates on many levels, engaging both moral and philosophical issues, there is an important role for empirical research: do efforts to rehabilitate offenders demonstrably lead to a reduction in offending?
The issue for researchers therefore seems plain: do attempts at rehabilitation work? Arriving at an answer to this question is not so straightforward. How is it possible to make sense of the outcome evidence from studies using different types of treatment, conducted with different offender populations, and carried out in a range of settings?
In the late 1960s, a research team was commissioned in New York state specifically to address the issue of the effectiveness of rehabilitation with offenders. The research team was given the task of conducting a comprehensive review of the effectiveness of rehabilitative efforts in prisons.
Design and procedure:- The researchers set about their survey in the traditional way. They conducted a search of the literature, identifying a total of 231 relevant treatment outcome studies appearing between 1945 and 1967. Following traditional review procedures, they then set their criteria for successful and unsuccessful studies and categorized each study according to these criteria. This procedure is sometimes referred to as ‘vote counting’.
Results and implications:- The dissemination of the findings of government-sponsored applied research is not always straightforward. The researchers presented a 1400-page manuscript to the state committee in the early 1970s, and eventually a book was published giving details of the research (Lipton, Martinson & Wilks, 1975). But the research findings presented in the book were not what created the study’s major impact. In 1974 one member of the research group, Robert Martinson, individually published an article in a general interest journal, pre-empting the book (Martinson, 1974). His general stance is that there is very little evidence that treatment has any significant effect on offending. Martinson’s paper begins by asking ‘What works?’ and concludes with a section ‘Does nothing work?’ (to which he finds the answer, with some caveats, to be affirmative). The notion that ‘nothing works’ took hold in many quarters, including academic researchers, policy-makers in the criminal justice system and the public at large. The impact of the message was significant, as funding was withdrawn from projects aimed at rehabilitation, prisons espoused a custodial rather than rehabilitative role, and theory and practice shifted to punishment, deterrence and ‘just desserts’ for offenders.
Lipton, D.S., Martinson, R., & Wilks, J., 1975, The Effectiveness of Correctional Treatment, New York: Praeger.
Martinson, R., 1974, ‘What works? Questions and answers about prison reform’, Public Interest, 35, 22–54.
The academic relationship between criminology and psychology has not always been harmonious (Hollin, 2002a). Studies of the first criminologists, in the late 1800s, focused on the individual offender, and it was hard to distinguish between criminologists and psychologists. In the 1930s, the focus in mainstream criminology shifted from the individual to society, and psychological theories of criminal behaviour held little sway compared to sociological theories. But since the 1990s, there has been an increasing dialogue between the disciplines as the study of the individual once again becomes a concern in criminology (Lilly, Cullen & Ball, 2001).
THE CAMBRIDGE STUDY - Predicting delinquency
One of the main findings from longitudinal research is that most juvenile crime is ‘adolescence limited’. [longitudinal research type of research design in which data are collected from a group of people, termed a cohort, over a long period of time (typically decades)] In other words, most young offenders ‘grow out’ of crime by the time they are 18 (Moffitt, 1993). But some juveniles (called ‘life-course persistent’ offenders) will continue offending into adulthood (Moffitt, 1993). Developmental criminology attempts to identify the factors that predict longer-term offending, in turn contributing to preventative efforts.
The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development is an extensive longitudinal study conducted in Great Britain that has generated a wealth of data (Farrington, 2002). [Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development longitudinal study, based at the University of Cambridge, concerned with the development of delinquency and later adult crime] It began in 1961 with a cohort of 411 boys aged eight and nine, and it is still in progress, with over 90 per cent of the sample still alive. The methodology used in the Cambridge Study has involved not only access to official records, but also repeated testing and interviewing of the participants, as well as their parents, peers and schoolteachers. Approximately 20 per cent of the young men involved in the survey were convicted as juveniles, a figure that grew to 40 per cent convicted (excluding minor crimes) by 40 years of age. The official convictions matched reasonably well with self-reported delinquency.
By comparing the worst offenders with the remainder of the cohort, predictive factors began to emerge. These are factors evident during childhood and adolescence that have predictive value with respect to behaviour in later life. The Cambridge Study strongly suggests that the intensity and severity of certain adverse features in early life predict the onset of antisocial behaviour and later criminal behaviour.
Farrington (2002) lists these predictive factors as follows:
1. antisocial behaviour, including troublesomeness in school, dishonesty and aggressiveness;
2. hyperactivity–impulsivity–attention deficit, including poor concentration, restlessness and risk-taking;
3. low intelligence and poor school attainment;
4. family criminality as seen in parents and older siblings;
5. family poverty in terms of low family income, poor housing and large family size; and
6. harsh parenting style, lack of parental supervision, parental conflict and separation from parents.
Other studies have found similar predictors for aggression and violent conduct (Kingston & Prior, 1995). It is also evident that childhood antisocial behaviour and adolescent delinquency are related to other developmental problems. Stattin and Magnusson (1995) found clear relationships between the onset of official delinquency and other educational, behavioural and interpersonal problems. Farrington, Barnes and Lambert (1996) showed that these developmental problems are frequently concentrated in specific families. In their sample of 397 families, half the total convictions in the whole sample were accounted for by 23 families!
The force of the Cambridge Study and other similar research is to suggest that we need prevention strategies to reduce child and adolescent antisocial behaviour (Farrington, 2002). Such strategies might include improving young people’s school achievement and interpersonal skills, improving child-rearing practice and reducing poverty and social exclusion.
[David P. Farrington (1944– ) is currently Professor of Psychological Criminology at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge. A prolific researcher, he is widely cited for his work (initially with Donald West) on the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development. He has also published on a range of other topics, including shoplifting, bullying, crime prevention, and methodologies for evaluating criminological interventions. He has the distinction of being the first non-American President of the American Society of Criminology. He is a former chair of The British Psychological Society’s Division of Criminological and Legal Psychology.]
Adult criminals
A longitudinal study allows us to compare adult offenders and non-offenders to discover even more about the pathways to crime. When the cohort in the Cambridge Study reached the age of 18, the chronic offenders had a lifestyle characterized by heavy drinking, sexual promiscuity, drug use and minor crimes (mostly car theft, group violence and vandalism). They were highly unlikely to have any formal qualifications, they held unskilled manual jobs, and had had frequent periods of unemployment. By 32 years of age, the chronic offenders were unlikely to be home-owners, had low-paid jobs, were likely to have physically assaulted their partner, and used a wide range of drugs. As you might expect, they had an extensive history of fines, probation orders and prison sentences. It was clear from their life histories and current circumstances that these men were leading a bleak and socially dysfunctional existence.
The data also point to protective factors. These are factors that appear to balance the negative predictors, so that at times when you would expect offending to occur, it does not. When males show all the predictive signs for a criminal career and yet do not commit offences, Farrington and West (1990) label them ‘good boys from bad backgrounds’. These men were generally shy during adolescence and socially withdrawn as adults. While not involved in crime, they did experience relationship problems with their parents or partners. Forming close relationships in early adulthood also seems to be related to a decrease in offending. In particular, those offenders who married showed a decrease in offending – providing that their partner was not a convicted offender (Farrington & West, 1995).
It would be a mistake to try to construct an exact model of a criminal career from all these data. There are too many unanswered questions for us to be overly confident in predicting the outcome, and simply describing the predictive factors is not the same as explaining how they bring about delinquent behaviour. Thus far, there is no grand theory to explain how the interaction between a young person and his or her environmental circumstances culminates in criminality. However, there are enough positive developments in the extant literature to indicate that this might be feasible in the future, at least with respect to certain probabilities and confidence limits.
VIOLENT OFFENDERS
Criminal behaviour takes many forms, but there is little doubt that violent acts are a source of great public concern. A recent World Health Report (Krug et al., 2002) referred to violence as ‘a global public health problem’. Contemporary psychological theory characterizes violence in this context in terms of an interaction between the qualities of the individual and characteristics of their environment.
The development of violent behaviour
As with delinquency, the development of violent behaviour can be studied over the lifespan, leading to the formulation of complex models of violent conduct. Nietzel, Hasemann and Lynam (1999) developed a model based on four sequential stages across the lifespan. This is an excellent example of an attempt to integrate social, environmental and individual factors to characterize the key factors underlying violence. At the first stage, there are distal antecedents to violence. These are divided into biological precursors (including genetic transmission and lability of the autonomic nervous system – psychological predispositions (including impulsivity and deficient problem solving) and environmental factors (such as family functioning and the social fabric of the neighbourhood). At the second stage, there are early indicators of violence as the child develops, such as conduct disorder and poor emotional regulation. Third, as the child matures the developmental processes associated with the intensification of vio lent behaviour come into effect, including school failure, association with delinquent peers, and substance abuse.
Finally, as the adolescent moves into adulthood there is a stage at which maintenance variables come into force, including continued reinforcement for violent conduct, association with criminal peers, and social conditions that provide opportunities for crime.
A psychological profile of violence
Research has also begun to uncover some of the psychological processes characteristic of the violent person. For example, the influential work of Dodge and colleagues has drawn on social information processing [social information processing theoretical model of how we perceive and understand the words and actions of other people] (i.e. how we perceive and understand and the words and actions of other people) to seek to understand the psychology of violence. Crick and Dodge (1994; Dodge 1997) suggested that we follow a sequence of steps when we process social information:
1 encoding social cues
2 making sense of these cues
3 a cognitive search for the appropriate response
4 deciding on the best option for making a response
5 making a response
Dodge proposed that violent behaviour may result from deficits and biases at any of these stages.
Beginning with social perception, there is evidence that aggressive young people search for and encode fewer social cues than their non-aggressive peers (Dodge & Newman, 1981) and pay more attention to cues at the end of an interaction (Crick & Dodge, 1994). This misperception may in turn lead to misattribution of intent, so that the actions of other people are mistakenly seen as hostile or threatening (Akhtar & Bradley, 1991; Crick & Dodge, 1996). Working out how best to respond to a situation is a cognitive ability often referred to as social problem solving. It involves generating feasible courses of action, considering potential alternatives and their likely consequences, and making plans for achieving the desired outcome (Spivack, Platt & Shure, 1976). Studies suggest that violent people show restricted problemsolving ability and consider fewer consequences than non-violent people (Slaby & Guerra, 1988). This sequence of cognitive events culminates in violent behaviour, which the violent person may view as an acceptable, legitimate form of conduct (Slaby & Guerra, 1988).
The role of anger
Cognitions interact with emotions, and anger (particularly dysfunctional anger) is the emotional state most frequently associated with violent behaviour (Blackburn, 1993). Anger may be said to be dysfunctional when it has significantly negative consequences for the individual or for other people (Swaffer & Hollin, 2001). It would be wrong to say that anger is the principal cause of violence, or that all violent offenders are angry, but clearly it is a consideration in understanding violence.
Currently, the most influential theory of anger is Novaco’s (1975). According to Novaco, for someone to become angry, an environmental event must first trigger distinctive patterns of physiological and cognitive arousal. This trigger usually lies in the individual’s perception of the words and actions of another person.
When we become angry, physiological and cognitive processes are kicked into action. Increased autonomic nervous system activity includes a rise in body temperature, perspiration, muscular tension and increased cardiovascular activity. The relevant cognitive processes (Novaco & Welsh, 1989) involve various types of information-processing biases concerned with the encoding of interpretation and triggering cues. For example, attentional cueing is the tendency to see hostility and provocation in the words and actions of other people, while an attribution error occurs when the individual believes that his or her own behaviour is determined by the situation, but that the behaviour of other people is explained by their personality. The progression from anger to violence is associated with the disinhibition of internal control, which can result from factors such as high levels of physiological arousal, the perception that there is little chance of being apprehended or punished, and the perpetrator’s use of drugs or alcohol.
Moral reasoning
There is a long history of research into the relationship between moral reasoning and offending (Palmer, 2003). Gibbs has examined the specific association between moral reasoning and violent behaviour, focusing on the bridge between theories of social information processing and moral development. Gibbs and colleagues suggest that this bridge takes the form of cognitive distortions (Gibbs, 1993; Goldstein, Glick & Gibbs, 1998) by which we rationalize or mislabel our own behaviour.
For example, if I perceive someone else’s actions as having hostile intent, leading me to assault them, my distorted rationalization might be that ‘he was asking for it’. Cognitive distortion is also seen in my biased interpretation of the consequences of my behaviour. So I might say that my victim ‘could have had it worse’ or ‘wasn’t too badly hurt’ or that ‘no real damage was done’ (Gibbs, 1996). These powerful types of distorted thinking are often socially supported and reinforced by the offender’s peer group.
The effectiveness of rehabilitation - A research issue
Historically, there is a longstanding struggle between liberal proponents of rehabilitation of offenders and conservative advocates of punishment for those who commit crimes. While this debate operates on many levels, engaging both moral and philosophical issues, there is an important role for empirical research: do efforts to rehabilitate offenders demonstrably lead to a reduction in offending?
The issue for researchers therefore seems plain: do attempts at rehabilitation work? Arriving at an answer to this question is not so straightforward. How is it possible to make sense of the outcome evidence from studies using different types of treatment, conducted with different offender populations, and carried out in a range of settings?
In the late 1960s, a research team was commissioned in New York state specifically to address the issue of the effectiveness of rehabilitation with offenders. The research team was given the task of conducting a comprehensive review of the effectiveness of rehabilitative efforts in prisons.
Design and procedure:- The researchers set about their survey in the traditional way. They conducted a search of the literature, identifying a total of 231 relevant treatment outcome studies appearing between 1945 and 1967. Following traditional review procedures, they then set their criteria for successful and unsuccessful studies and categorized each study according to these criteria. This procedure is sometimes referred to as ‘vote counting’.
Results and implications:- The dissemination of the findings of government-sponsored applied research is not always straightforward. The researchers presented a 1400-page manuscript to the state committee in the early 1970s, and eventually a book was published giving details of the research (Lipton, Martinson & Wilks, 1975). But the research findings presented in the book were not what created the study’s major impact. In 1974 one member of the research group, Robert Martinson, individually published an article in a general interest journal, pre-empting the book (Martinson, 1974). His general stance is that there is very little evidence that treatment has any significant effect on offending. Martinson’s paper begins by asking ‘What works?’ and concludes with a section ‘Does nothing work?’ (to which he finds the answer, with some caveats, to be affirmative). The notion that ‘nothing works’ took hold in many quarters, including academic researchers, policy-makers in the criminal justice system and the public at large. The impact of the message was significant, as funding was withdrawn from projects aimed at rehabilitation, prisons espoused a custodial rather than rehabilitative role, and theory and practice shifted to punishment, deterrence and ‘just desserts’ for offenders.
Lipton, D.S., Martinson, R., & Wilks, J., 1975, The Effectiveness of Correctional Treatment, New York: Praeger.
Martinson, R., 1974, ‘What works? Questions and answers about prison reform’, Public Interest, 35, 22–54.
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