Chapter 4
Supportive Authority and the Strategy of Choices

The Problem of Engagement

Skilled counselors and therapists have always been able to achieve meaningful engagement with some offenders some of the time. The challenge to correctional treatment is to identify the conditions that make this engagement possible in the face of offenders’ notorious resistance, to make these conditions practical and available to a wider range of facilitators, and to extend their application to a wider range of offenders.

Specialized treatment programs do not solve the problem. The problem of nonengagement applies to specialized programs, such as those for sexual offenders, violent offenders, and family violence offenders; as well as those for general offenders (Feder & Wilson, 2005; Marshall & Barbaree, 1989; Nunes & Cortoni, 2006; Wormith & Olver, 2002). Patterns of resistance vary with different kinds of offender and different individuals – as do their patterns of pro-criminal thinking and their patterns of offending behaviors – but the problem of engagement in offender treatment is universal. We have argued in the previous chapter that the problem of engagement in treatment is essentially one and the same as the problem of offending behavior itself. Offenders have a personal investment in the attitudes and ways of thinking that lead them to offend. The problem manifests not just in offending behavior, but in resistance to change, lack of engagement to treatment, and defiance of authority. Whatever their pattern of offending, offenders are not motivated to change, they are motivated to offend, and that is exactly the problem.

As we see it, offenders’ thinking and behavior is not based on a miscalculation of their true self-interest, and it is not, generally or usually, the result of one or several discreet distorted or dysfunctional beliefs within broader and essentially “normal” (= non-criminogenic) patterns of cognition and emotion. Their beliefs are not dysfunctional; rather, the key to understanding their thinking involves recognizing just how “functional” these beliefs are in the overall lives of offenders. Their experience of themselves as persons is intimately connected to, and dependent upon, the thinking that leads them to offend. They have, literally and concretely, an existential stake in being as they are, and staying that way.

This chapter presents a strategy of communication with offenders that takes this into account. Our premise is that the offenders we most want to engage in a process of change – recidivist, high risk, hard-core – are not compliant with authority, are not motivated to change, and would rather not talk to us at all. Punishment and the threat of it achieve short-term compliance, but not long-term change. Our strategy of communication applies to all offenders. With those that are less than hard-core, we speak not to their “good side,” but to their willful determination (such as it is) to think and act as offenders.

Key elements of that strategy are illustrated in the following episode with the group of “state-raised” convicts described in Chapter 2. The rare circumstances of mutual respect and nonadversarial purpose that made this group possible in the first place are described in Chapter 2. The conditions of this group’s engagement as a group were crystallized in this interaction between the facilitator (JB) and the group:

By the end of our year of meetings I had given up trying to convince these men that they would be meaningfully “better off” if they abandoned their convict ways of thinking and became law-abiding citizens. They were just too whole-heartedly committed to the virtues of their convict code and to their status and pride in being “true convicts.” One man had expressed affection for his young son and disappointment that he was not able to share in his life. When I challenged him with the question, “Do you really want your son to live by your attitudes and values, even knowing that it will lead to a life like yours with a likely prospect of many years in prison?” He thought for a moment then said, “Yes, I really would.” He was clearly sincere.

During a session near the end of the year with this group, I spoke to them saying these words:

“OK, you guys, you’re happy with yourselves the way you are, and I have to respect your right to live your lives your way. If you choose to live your life by violence and stealing and selling drugs, that’s your choice to make, and I respect your right to make it. But understand too, that I and people like me have our own choices to make. I choose to join together with my neighbors and pass laws and hire policemen and judges and build prisons so that we can be protected from people like you. That’s our choice to make. Fair is fair.”

They didn’t say a word. They’d never thought about it that way before, and frankly, neither had I. Finally, one of them said,

“That’s cold.”

Instead of threatening the connection between us, this moment cemented it. These exact circumstances are unlikely to be replicated, but the engagement and collaboration achieved by this group can be. This conversation displayed some of the conditions we identify as essential to engagement and collaboration in treatment. It also illustrates the major idea of this chapter: the concept of Supportive Authority.

Conditions of Communication and Engagement

Recent developments in correctional treatment have made progress toward effective communication with offenders. We note in particular the strategies of Motivational Interviewing (MI). These strategies include:

• express empathy with the client;
• develop discrepancy between the client’s target behavior (substance abuse, offending behavior) and the client’s own values beliefs and goals;
• avoid argumentation;
• roll with resistance;
• elicit self-motivational statements; and
• emphasize choice. (Mann, Ginsburg, & Weekes, 2002: 90)

Though the authors’ strategy of change is quite different from MI, our underlying strategies of communication are similar. (We do not follow the second point listed above, and we do not “paraphrase” offender’s reports of their thinking to emphasize discrepancy with their own values.) Unlike MI, we do not presume offenders to be ambivalent about change or to experience any discrepancy between their values, beliefs, and goals and their offending behavior. This is one aspect of our determination to include “hard-core” (unmotivated) offenders within the scope of meaningful intervention and change. In our strategy of intervention, motivation to change – for all offenders, hard-core and not-so-hard-core alike – comes toward the end of treatment, not at the beginning. But we agree particularly and wholeheartedly with MI’s “nonauthoritarian” stance, its avoidance of argumentation, and its emphasis on offender choice. These strategies, we believe, strike to the heart of the problem of offenders’ lack of engagement in treatment and their resistance to change.

We go further. Our communication with offenders is nonconfrontational because that is a condition of offenders being able to hear what we have to say. We look to our own assumptions and presuppositions. We present ourselves to offenders not as experts on how they should be, but as interested and curious to discover how they are. We step aside from both moral and clinical judgments. We attempt to define common ground shared by them and us, without threatening their integrity or abandoning our own. We do not pretend to understand them better than they understand themselves. We have no purpose in talking with them – and no “expert” interpretation of our conversations – that we do not share and explain to them.

But these strategies still fall short of engaging most offenders in meaningful communication. Underlying the failure of punishment and the limited success of treatment to change offending behavior is the existential fact that offenders remain free to define and maintain their own attitudes no matter what we do or say to them. This abstract principle takes concrete form in the stubborn defiance of extreme offenders in the face of the direst punishment (French & Gendreau, 2006; Gibbons & Katzenbach, 2006) – and in the commonplace defiance of authority and the rejection of treatment displayed by the more ordinary, less-than-hard-core offenders’ in our everyday efforts to encourage change. We cannot make them change because they can and will successfully defy our efforts as long as they are determined to do so. They have discovered this freedom in the course of living their lives, and they make the most of it. For many offenders, the determination to defy authority and discount all interests other than those they declare to be their own becomes a central life-principle (“My life, my rules”).

But other, less-than-hard-core offenders can be equally determined to cling to their own pro-offending attitudes, especially in the face of opposition to those attitudes. The result is a tough nut to crack. A conclusion drawn by some psychologists, correctional administrators, and many politicians is that nothing can be done other than to continue the “war on crime” as best we can while providing treatment to those who are “ready” for it, even though we recognize that conducting that war inevitably perpetuates the very war we are trying to win, and that treating those we can “reach” leaves the main scope of the problem untouched.¹ We believe that we can do better.

All offenders (this is our position) are willfully attached – some deeply, some more superficially – to pro-offending attitudes. Offenders’ attachment to their ways of thinking is within their control, not ours. This poses a limit on the scope of correctional intervention, but it also defines a positive condition and a premise for communication. Offenders are free to choose their own attitudes toward whatever we have to say to them, and that fact shapes our own thinking. We acknowledge and respect that freedom, and by making this explicit in our communication with offenders, we define yet one more way in which our message does not threaten their autonomy or experience of identity. And more: their freedom – and ours – to choose our own attitudes defines a common ground, a concrete instance of our common humanity. In this sense and to just this degree, we can communicate as equals. Our common humanity with offenders is a potential bond and foundation for communication and collaboration. We exploit this potential.

Still, the problem of communication and engagement with offenders is not solved. Offenders’ perception of correctional treatment as an unwelcome intrusion in their lives is not a cognitive distortion. Intervention in offending behavior begins only after an offender is arrested. Law enforcement and the criminal justice system define the context, the meaning, and the purpose of correctional treatment, and it is only within this context that offenders are willing to talk to us at all.

We have witnessed (and even been part of) attempts to present treatment to offenders as a distinct and isolated process that stands apart from the controls and punishments of criminal justice. The results were consistently (and we believe, inevitably) to nurture a counterproductive schism and conflict between the authority of the law and the goals and processes of treatment – which is counterproductive in the concrete sense that respect for the law is exactly what we hope to achieve by treatment. In the minds of offenders, this schism takes the form of viewing treatment as their rescuer from the evils of correctional control. In the minds of corrections officers it takes the form of resenting treatment (and treatment providers) as undermining their own responsibility for security and control. Treatment providers either remain naive or end up choosing sides and so disabling their effectiveness as treatment providers. This circumstance is frequent enough in correctional systems throughout the world – in those systems that offer treatment at all – to be considered a serious issue in the planning and delivery of systems of intervention (Blackburn, 2002; Paparozzi & Gendreau, 2005).

We believe the authority of the law is, and needs to be, an essential component of correctional treatment. As correctional treatment providers we take it upon ourselves to represent the authority of the law and that of whatever agency or institution we are part of, and we present ourselves as such to offenders. The message of authority – that society will not permit its laws to be broken – is an explicit and integral part of our message of treatment

Still, the message and meaning of law enforcement and criminal justice – as perceived by offenders – are often, typically and historically, at odds with the goals and methods of treatment. Physical control displaces freedom and responsibility. The attitudes taught and practiced in systems of correctional control (probation, incarceration) often undermine the methods and goals of treatment. Such systems are explicitly adversarial. At a fundamental structural level, they reinforce offenders’ adversarial attitudes toward authority. Left unchecked, such systems can (and do) degenerate into a mutually dehumanizing standoff. In some “tough” prisons the adversarial dynamics of “us versus them” is palpable. Prisoners and their keepers stand in deep and permanent opposition.²

We confront this dilemma: the authority of the law is essential to effective intervention and treatment, and the authority of the law automatically triggers resistance from offenders whose thinking is already to some degree antisocial and anti-authority – which is essentially all of them, but especially recidivists, and most especially those we call hard-core. Our solution here is to build the message of treatment into the authority of the law. We step beyond the bounds of correctional treatment into the domain of criminal justice strategy and philosophy.

The result is a definition and strategy of exercising authority that combines enforced control with respect for offenders’ freedom to choose and the presentation of meaningful opportunities to change. We call it “Supportive Authority.”

We begin by explaining and justifying Supportive Authority in broad terms. We then explain the use of Supportive Authority to enforce rules and standards of performance in the limited context of correctional treatment (the “Strategy of Choices”). In Chapter 6, we return to the broader concept and explore the implications and possibilities of Supportive Authority for the criminal justice system and public policy.

Supportive Authority

We think of the authority of the law as a message sent from society to offenders. We interpret that act of communication (as with most issues addressed in this book) phenomenologically. We look to the conscious intent of those who send that message, and the conscious interpretation of that message by those who receive it.

In a crude (but accurate) form, the dominant message of traditional legal authority to offenders is: “Comply with the law, or else,” where “or else” refers to an array of consequences consisting of various forms and various degrees of punishment. In effect, this message of authority is a declaration of war against offenders. However much one might want to believe that this war is against their behavior and not against offenders, those offenders who take their pro-criminal thinking to heart perceive it as personal. And they are right.³

Supportive Authority is a combination of three messages spoken with one voice:

The law will be enforced: society will not permit you to break its laws, and if you persist in doing so we will act to stop you. This is nothing personal. We do not condemn you, but we will act to protect ourselves and our ability to live as we choose.

AND:

You have an opportunity to live within the law and we will support you in doing so: there is a path that you can follow that leads from where you are now to a life of meaningful participation in society. We encourage you to take that path and will support your success.

AND:

The choice is yours: we respect the choice as being yours alone to make. Whatever you choose, we will act accordingly. The law will be enforced. And we will continue to present you with opportunity to change.

Supportive Authority combines these three messages into one. Each qualifies, but does not compromise each of the other two. Supportive Authority is the combined meaning of all three.

The idea is represented in Figures 4.1 and 4.2.

Figure 4.1 The Voice of Supportive Authority

Figure 4.2 The Elements of Supportive Authority

Supportive Authority will stir objections. By conjoining treatment with law enforcement it overrides the familiar dichotomy of punishment versus treatment. Supportive Authority abandons an attitude of righteous punishment (which in itself will stir the objections of many) in favor of impersonal enforcement of the law. There is no implication of personal blame. It conjoins enforcement of the law with presentation of concrete opportunity, and active support for offenders’ success in pursuing that opportunity. Some will argue that offenders deserve no such favors. Acknowledging offenders’ freedom to choose will stir objections from some who fear this blunts the attempt to make crime stop.

To all of these objections we make this suggestion: Supportive Authority is not as extreme as it might appear, and it is an effective way of achieving the goals most of us seek. It does not compromise the responsibility or commitment to control offending behavior by enforcing the law, or the conviction held by many of us on the treatment side that punishment is futile and offenders need treatment.

Supportive Authority derives from the underlying premise that – whether we like it or not, and whether we admit it or not – offenders have the freedom to choose their own attitudes toward whatever we say or do to them. In acknowledging offenders’ freedom to choose, we are not granting offenders anything they do not already have. We cannot deny them that freedom even if we try, but by explicitly acknowledging that freedom we can dispel their perception that we are attempting to do just that. Our authority does not threaten their most basic level of autonomy. Put another way, by acknowledging offenders’ freedom to choose we are acknowledging this aspect of their fundamental humanity.

Enforcement

The freedom of offenders (and everyone else) to choose their own attitudes toward the authority of the law does not translate into a right to break the law. In a free society, citizens are free to create laws to protect their own freedom and their own interest, and we do. Fair is fair.

In Supportive Authority the law is enforced without personal blame, but that does not weaken its message. It strengthens it.

Whoever you are, whatever you have suffered, whatever your circumstances, you are not permitted to break the law, and if you do we will enforce it.

Supportive Authority applies to offenders whose offending behavior is somehow a result of being victimized in the same way that it applies to every other offender. The law is enforced whatever their personal history or the psychological causes of their behavior. It does not punish in the sense of inflicting pain for the sake of retribution, but it imposes constraints on offenders’ ability to offend, and those constraints (arrest, supervision, incarceration) are painful. Enforcement of the law is presented like a stone wall: it does not cause pain unless you run headlong into it.

Respect for the law is a condition of participating in society.

Opportunity

The ability of repeat offenders to participate in society is blocked not just by the constraints imposed on them by the law and the social stigma of being ex-offenders, but by their own pro-offending ways of thinking that they cling to and live by. For these offenders, the opportunity to participate in society starts with the opportunity to change their thinking.

Correctional treatment presents that opportunity. Almost all forms of correctional treatment that have proven to be effective can be described as presenting an opportunity to offenders to change both their behavior and their ways of thinking. Substance abuse treatment, social skills training, problem solving, pro-social cognitive skills, job skills training, CBT, treatment for physical and psychological special needs – all of these interventions, whatever their underlying theories and assumptions about how and why they work, present offenders with a personally relevant and meaningful opportunity to change that involves change in underlying ways of thinking. Or at least they can, and sometimes they do.

We suggest that the primary role of correctional treatment is just that: to present to offenders the possibility of change as a realistic, meaningful, and personal opportunity. Offenders’ opportunity to participate in society depends on factors other than how they think and what skills they have. The goal of treatment is to convert offenders into ex-offenders, and ex-offenders face notorious barriers to rejoining society. Society’s willingness to accept ex-offenders back into its midst raises issues beyond the scope of this book, but not by much. To the extent that their opportunity to participate in society is closed, either by society or their own thinking, to just that extent offenders have no meaningful choice at all. They are faced with choosing between complying with forces directly opposed to the attitudes, beliefs, and personal principles they make their own and live by, or being outlaws.

Supportive Authority does not pose a trade-off between treatment and control. The benefits of treatment to offenders lie in their future, not necessarily in their current circumstances of supervision. The common correctional practice of presenting treatment to offenders as an alternative to incarceration can, and does (not always, but too often), trigger and reinforce their resistance to authority. Offenders perceive treatment in these conditions (correctly) as another case of forced compliance. The trade-off of incarceration for treatment is often a bad deal for society – presuming that a sentence of incarceration is appropriate in the first place. Effective current treatment programs reduce recidivism by 20–30%, not by 50% or more. Yet offenders are often promised reduction of their sentence (or threatened with implementation of a sentence) out of proportion to that estimate.⁴

Some offenders will need to spend their life in a cage. Their demonstrated risk of harm to society may be so great, and their response to whatever opportunity we are able to present to them so unpromising, that it would be foolhardy to turn them loose. We find in that no reason to deny opportunity to anyone. There are degrees of freedom even within cages. The conditions of a prisoner’s confinement can be varied in proportion to that prisoner’s demonstrated ability and willingness to live in it as defined by the principle of Supportive Authority: participation in society is conditional upon respect for the law. The keepers of dangerous offenders – treatment providers and guards – can seek ways to find and communicate opportunities to participate in society that are within the capacity of those offenders to understand and respond. However limited the promise, it is worth the effort. As measured by the total expense of these things, it costs relatively little to present meaningful opportunity to all offenders and to respect their freedom to make their own decisions to whatever the extent they are capable of doing so.

The standing message of Supportive Authority is universal:

Whoever you are and whatever you have done, you can steer your life toward a meaningful future inside the law.

The combined message of enforcement and support for change is most clear when the same people convey both. An illustration:

Administrators of the Vermont Department of Corrections (including the Commissioner, Joe Patrissi, and his assistant and successor, John Gorczsyk) were convinced that the biggest barrier to correctional change was the inherent and apparently inevitable hostility between offenders and the corrections staff who attempt to effect that change. They defined the problem as “us versus them.” Supportive Authority offered a solution. When Cognitive Self Change was implemented at the prison in St. Albans, Vermont, corrections officers were recruited to provide security on the living unit that housed the program. These same officers were encouraged and expected to take an active role in the treatment process. They expressed some resistance. They saw their primary role as providing security and control in the institution and were unwilling to compromise that responsibility. But they came to realize that their role in treatment did not diminish – in any way or to any degree – their role of security and control, and vice versa. They accepted the analogy to being a parent. Parents’ responsibility to both nurture and discipline a child need not be divided between a strict father and a nurturing mother: one parent can do both. They spoke of “wearing two hats,” but rather than switch from one hat to the other, they wore both hats all the time. They enforced institutional rules for program members exactly as they enforced these rules for all inmates of the institution. And at the same time, they were actively engaged in treatment. They perceived their new responsibilities not as diminishing or compromising their correctional role, but as an enhancement of that role. They were excited about it.

After three weeks of training, a team of these officers took over responsibility for delivering treatment groups. (JB and a social worker assigned to the program supervised but did not lead these groups.) These officers established engagement and constructive rapport with the offenders in their groups.

It was routine practice in that institution at that time to sentence offenders to 30 days in segregation (solitary confinement) for what were regarded as serious rule violations (fighting, use of drugs). When program corrections officers were directly involved in enforcing this consequence, they followed up by personally visiting that offender in segregation and explaining that this was not necessarily the end of the road. The offender would be welcomed back into treatment, but only if they made a decision and a credible commitment to respect the institution rules. The offender was then left to finish his time in segregation. There was never any “trade-off” of reduced sentence in exchange for promises to change. But offenders were left with an option to think about, delivered as a personal invitation.

These same officers brought their enforcement role – wearing the uniforms that represented that role – into the treatment groups they facilitated. There was no sense of contradiction.⁵

This team of corrections officers saw their treatment role not as diminishing their responsibility for security and control role, but enhancing it. One of them described that role as “two-dimensional” as opposed to the one-dimensional role of simply enforcing the rules.

Choice

We have argued several times that offenders are free to choose their own attitudes toward whatever we say or do to them. Acknowledgment and respect for that freedom underlies the messages of enforcement and opportunity.

• Acknowledging offenders’ freedom to choose grants them nothing that they do not already have, but by explicitly acknowledging and respecting that freedom we do not threaten it. We acknowledge and respect the autonomy they (rightly) demand.
• Respect for offenders’ autonomy as persons establishes a foundation for communication between us and them: our common humanity grounded in our shared freedom to choose our own path.
• Supportive Authority presents offending and change as a personal choice.

  You can choose to continue to break the law and suffer the consequences of its enforcement, or you can choose to accept our offer of opportunity and we will work together on a path to rejoining society.

• In its most focused form, Supportive Authority does not just allow offenders to choose, it makes them choose. Offenders experience their freedom to choose not as license to do what they want, but as an inescapable challenge.

  It is your choice. Now make it.

Rethinking Correctional Treatment

The authors suggest that a primary role of correctional treatment is to make the opportunity to change a personal, realistic, and meaningful option to individual offenders. So conceived, treatment is a first step on a path toward responsible participation in society. Many forms of treatment can already be described in those terms: addiction treatment, cognitive skills training, problem-solving, social skills training, CBT, jobs skills training, and general education all provide opportunity to offenders who, in some way and to some degree, otherwise lack it.

Our conception of correctional treatment rests on the premise that, at its foundations, offending behavior arises from offenders’ willful attachment to their pro-offending ways of thinking. The change we suggest is in how we conceive the project of treatment, and how we present it to offenders – to abandon the notion that correctional treatment cures pathologies or remedies deficits, and instead invest our energies into making the opportunity to change realistic and meaningful to offenders: to present offenders with a meaningful choice.

In the context of Supportive Authority, treatment has a new status. It becomes a core correctional practice. (This and other implications are explored in Chapter 6, “Extended Applications of Supportive Authority.”)

It is beyond the power (and responsibility) of treatment providers to define the meaning of legal authority. Correctional treatment is delivered in the context of a broad and powerful system of criminal justice that enforces the law by imposing consequences for breaking it, and in so doing defines how the authority of the law is perceived and understood by offenders. But treatment providers have their own domain of authority and control. In the next section, we describe a concrete strategy of defining and enforcing rules and standards of participation in treatment. We call it the “Strategy of Choices.” We use the Strategy of Choices in our own treatment process (“Cognitive Self Change,” Chapter 5), but we recommend it for any treatment process faced with the problem of enforcing rules and standard of performance without triggering resistance.

The Strategy of Choices

We begin by reflecting on our own authority as treatment providers. We recognize that a clear assertion of authority is essential for effective treatment. The authors reached this conclusion based on their own experience, but there is evidence that it pertains to any correctional treatment process (Andrews & Bonta, 2010). Correctional treatment needs to be delivered with clearly defined rules and conditions and standards of performance, and it is the responsibility of treatment providers to define what these are and to enforce them. But how can treatment providers exercise their authority without triggering automatic resistance? Simply dictating rules and imposing consequences does not work. Authoritarian control creates a conflict between us and them from the very start, which is itself a form of the very problem we are trying to solve. We arrived at this new message of authority to offenders:

This treatment program has definite rules and conditions.

You can accept these rules and participate in the program, or you can reject these rules and conditions and not participate in the program. That is your choice to make.

But you cannot reject these rules and conditions (by words or deeds) and also participate in the program. That is our choice to make.

We will not condemn or blame you, but the program will not work unless you abide by these conditions, and we are not willing to participate in a process that we know is doomed to fail.

Now, decide.

We define rules not in terms of their behavior, but ultimately in terms of our own: we are not willing to participate in a process that we know is doomed to fail. In place of giving orders and threatening punishment for noncompliance, we challenge offenders to make choices. It is a subtle difference, in that there are consequences to their choices that may be unpleasant, but it is a difference that makes all the difference.

The offer of collaboration in treatment is built into the message of authority, and the message of authority is built into the offer of collaboration. Underlying both is our acknowledgment of, and respect for, offenders’ freedom to choose.

We start the Strategy of Choices with a personal interview with each offender before he or she begins treatment. We explain the four steps of CSC and the process of objective thinking reports. We explain that we do not require a commitment to change, but that we do require a commitment to respect the rules and standards necessary for the program to work. These are simple and basic:

1. Make an honest effort.
2. Be respectful.

We explain that “honest effort” means doing treatment assignments and participating in group discussions. “Honest effort” means that superficial compliance is not good enough; we expect and require a sincere effort to learn. We explain that respect is unconditional in the sense that it means being respectful of others whether or not others are being respectful of you.⁶

We do not enter into legalistic debates about what counts as honesty or respect. We are confident in our ability to make these judgments, and accept it as part of our responsibility as treatment providers to do so.

We ask each offender to commit to these rules before he or she joins the program. At this point, of course, offenders are not in a position to fully understand what we are saying, or to fully trust us about being objective and respecting their freedom to choose. Nor are we in a position to know whether they will keep their commitment. (Experience tells us many will not.) Nevertheless, we explain as clearly as we can and try to achieve a level of sincerity in their commitment. To the extent that we succeed, a meaningful step toward pro-social thinking will already have been accomplished. But the full meaning and importance of the Strategy of Choices is displayed later, when, and if, an offender fails to adhere to the rule or to meet the standard. When that happens we apply the Strategy of Choices all over again.

FACILITATOR: Your recent performance has failed to meet the rule (by displaying disrespect) or standard (by failing to make an honest effort), and that raises the question of whether you are willing to do what it takes to participate in the program. You need to make a new decision: you can recommit yourself to the rule and standard and stay in the program, or you can decide not to do that and drop out of the program. That choice is yours, and you need to make it. But you cannot remain in the program and at the same time decide not to follow the rule and standard. That choice is ours.

At the same time we impose this choice on the offender, we recommit ourselves to our part of the collaboration:

FACILITATOR: If you choose to recommit yourself to the rule and standard, I will stay committed to assuring your success in the program. There may be some special problems that we need to deal with in some special ways (emotionally laden personal attitudes, particularly provocative situations, trouble understanding exactly what is expected in a treatment assignment, fear of other group members, embarrassment about one’s past behavior or one’s thinking, etc.), and I will work with you to help solve those problems. But all of that depends on you being willing to accept the rule and standard of the program. It is up to you. You need to make a decision.

As with the offender’s initial commitment, we do our best to achieve a level of sincerity in their new commitment. We challenge them to be sincere. We do not expect perfect adherence. The Strategy of Choices might be applied several times in the course of treatment, but it is not a revolving door. Facilitators judge whether an offender’s new commitment is credible.

FACILITATOR: You have made this same commitment before and you failed to stick to it. What is different this time? If anything is different, help me see that. What is different about the way you think and feel about this now?

An offender’s response to that challenge is either credible, or it is not, or it remains ambiguous. If ambiguous, facilitators may create special tasks that provide that offender with an opportunity to demonstrate his or her sincerity. When, and if, offenders demonstrate their unwillingness to adhere to the rule and standard and fail to present a credible new commitment, they are dropped from the program. Offenders dropped from the program are always offered the chance to reapply and recommit themselves. Administrative issues (transfers and change of status) may prevent an offender from returning to treatment, but the program always leaves the door open. There are no “last chances” in the Strategy of Choices.

The Strategy of Choices challenges offenders to make conscious decisions instead of automatic responses. Applied over time, it can be a process in which offenders learn how to make a commitment and stick to it. This in itself is a significant step toward pro-social thinking.

The Strategy of Choices requires facilitators to make a number of subjective judgments: the sincerity and credibility of each offender’s commitment, behavior that is disrespectful, performance that displays a lack of honest effort (this always being relative to the abilities of the individual). We believe there is no escape from the responsibility to make these judgments. They are part of the human interaction that we regard as fundamental to effective correctional treatment – an aspect of the human connection between us and them.

The consequences to an offender for not participating in the program may be severe. Like most correctional treatment programs, CSC is usually “mandatory,” meaning that an offender’s supervision status (incarceration or community supervision) is contingent on their participation in treatment. This contingency is in effect the threat of punishment: “Participate in treatment, or go to jail (or stay in jail).” The challenge of the Strategy of Choices is to convey to offenders that they face a genuine choice, and that our offer of collaboration is genuinely supportive. To the extent that we succeed, the Strategy of Choices can begin to redefine how offenders perceive the meaning of rules and the enforcement of rules.

We offer two examples of the Strategy of Choices. The first is a brief series of interactions between an offender, his probation officer, and his treatment provider. The second extended over a period of several weeks and we describe that process in more detail.

Brad was on probation in Australia:

Brad was directed to attend CSC by his probation officer. He met with the facilitators, who explained the rules and conditions to him, and he agreed to attend. However, he then failed to attend group. This resulted in a final warning from his probation officer and a meeting with the program facilitator where he was asked to “recommit” to participate in the group as a condition of being readmitted. At that meeting he said, “My mates tell me it [the program] is bullshit.” When told that he had to agree to follow the rules in order to stay in the program, he stormed out, saying “Fuck it. Breach me!”

Within the hour, he rang his probation officer, saying “I realized what I had done when I was walking home,” and that he felt remorseful and scared of returning to custody. He then attended a recommitment meeting where he agreed to follow the program rules, and commenced attending.

If he had not rung his probation officer back, the facilitator would have rung him a day or two later, when he was calm, and presented his options to him again. If he had maintained his stance of not complying, the facilitator would have respected that choice and informed the probation officer that he did not intend to comply.

Red was incarcerated in an American prison:

Red had been incarcerated for over 10 years when he joined the CSC program. His sentence for murder was “zero to life,” which meant that he could be released at any time or incarcerated indefinitely if he failed to meet the conditions specified by the Department of Corrections for his release. Completion of Cognitive Self Change was one of these conditions. He participated in the program for two years in prison and earned a conditional release. He continued in the program in the community, meeting twice a week with a community CSC group.

Red was a good program client. He took his treatment assignments seriously. He gave open and honest thinking reports on his relationships and encounters with others: his girlfriend, his co-workers and supervisors on the job, his friends. When his thoughts and feelings posed a risk of leading him to hurtful or illegal behavior, he recognized that risk and steered his thoughts in a new direction. By all indications, Red was doing well in treatment and in his life.

For several months his CSC facilitators did not notice that Red avoided giving thinking reports on his meetings with his probation officer. It did not seem important. But when the topic happened to come up in a particular group discussion, Red expressed deep feelings of resentment and hostility toward his probation officer, the conditions of his release, the Department of Corrections, and the entire criminal justice system. His facilitators were alarmed. These thoughts and feelings toward legal authority surely posed risk of offending behavior.

Red did not deny that. He was familiar enough with the principles of CSC to see that these thoughts and feelings did, indeed, pose a risk of leading him to reoffend, but he was not ready to give them up. He said, “I’ve put up with the department’s bullshit for 10 years and I resent it and I’ve got damn good reason to resent it. They treat us like dirt. I’ve got a right to feel this way.” When the risk was pointed out to him, he acknowledged the risk but said, “I have it under control.”

The CSC facilitator team applied the Strategy of Choices. Red was on Step 4 of CSC. (Step 4 calls upon the offender to practice using new, noncriminogenic thinking in real-life situations.) The program standard required Red to practice using new, “non-risk” thinking whenever he recognized risk in his thoughts and feelings. There is no category or kind of risk that is exempt from this requirement. (If there were, an offender’s whole pattern of offending thinking and behavior could find its way through this loophole.) So we confronted Red with this choice:

“This is the most important area of risk in your life right now. You can apply the skills of CSC to this area of risk, or not. But if you choose not to deal with it, there is no point in staying in the program. It is up to you.”

Red struggled. If he dropped out of (or was dropped by) the program he would return to prison and face his life sentence. But he had built a deep feeling of personal integrity behind his righteous resentment of the criminal justice system. This was a stance he had built for himself against the circumstance of his life for over 10 years. A crisis was at hand. We gave him time to think. He had joined a Christian support group in prison, and the pastor of that group met with Red to talk about his decision. In the following week, CSC facilitators met with him several more times. There was no argument, and no attempt to convince Red that his thinking about criminal justice was distorted or wrong. Red had a choice to make and we kept the focus of attention on that choice. We did not try to make it easy. We all wanted Red to make what we believed was the right choice, but he had to make it himself. Our support for Red was palpable. Finally, in an emotional meeting with Red, his pastor, the pastor’s wife, and the team of CSC facilitators, Red said:

“OK. It’s about time.”

Red had made the decision to change his thinking about corrections and the criminal justice system, but that change was still to be accomplished. Red’s old habits of thinking were still with him. At just this time, Red was returned to jail for several weeks for a technical (i.e., noncriminal) violation that had nothing to do with his participation in CSC. He stayed in the program while he was back in jail. It was another moment of crisis: Red could view his re-incarceration as another instance of the Department’s unfairness, or he could stay committed to his decision to change that attitude. Red and his CSC facilitator created a plan where Red would watch for and take note of every “critical thought” he had about the corrections system or people associated with that system. He would write that thought in a journal, and for every critical thought he would write two positive thoughts about the same situation or the same person. He was not asked to reflect on these thoughts or try to decide which of them were really true. He just wrote them down. During the six weeks of his re-incarceration his journal filled several pages every day with dozens of three-line entries.

This task was part of Red’s performance of Step 4 of CSC: practice new ways to think in real-life situations. Details of how he did that assignment are described in the following chapter, “Cognitive Self Change.”

The Strategy of Choices can be brief and practically routine (as with Brad) or an extended process (as with Red) that challenges an offender to rethink his attitudes over a considerable period of time. The key to the Strategy of Choices is to create a “crisis of choice” that the offender him- or herself experiences as a crisis. Red’s experience of crisis lasted for several days. He found the courage and determination – with the help and support of those around him: his pastor and the pastor’s wife, his treatment providers, his probation officer – not to minimize what was at stake. His decision, when it came, was deeply meaningful, but that was not the end of it. He needed to move quickly to put that decision into practice in his everyday life.

Final Comments

Supportive Authority turns offenders’ automatic resistance and the consequences of that resistance into a deliberate and conscious choice. When it works, offenders experience their freedom to choose not as license to do what they want, but as the responsibility to make a decision.

The Strategy of Choices puts a limit to the perennial struggle of treatment providers to “win” the cooperation of offenders. The Strategy of Choices makes cooperation a condition of participation. If an offender will not make an honest effort, he or she is put out of the program, but that is only part of the story. Offenders are always presented with a choice, or even a series of choices. And more: as with the broader concept of Supportive Authority, the Strategy of Choices includes a commitment by those in authority to actively support offenders’ success. This means that facilitators ally themselves with offenders in a shared effort toward a common goal, that goal being for the offender to learn whatever it is that the program has to teach. This requires facilitators to pay attention to individual offenders and to respond to their perceptions and thoughts about whatever it is we are presenting to them. This, once again, is an aspect of the human connection between “us and them” that the authors believe is important to engaging offenders, and especially the most serious and most hard-core offenders, in a meaningful process of change.

Many “cognitive skills” programs are delivered out of scripted manuals. Offenders perform highly scripted activities, literally “going through the motions” of pro-social behaviors down to the level of the content of their thoughts. Arnold Goldstein was the acknowledged master of such skills training. Goldstein analyzed pro-social behaviors into simple concrete steps, and created mechanisms for reinforcing offenders’ performance of these steps (Goldstein & Glick, 1987; Goldstein, 1999). Goldstein’s process of “structured learning” is embodied in many contemporary skills programs. These programs have been demonstrated to work, at least for those offenders who complete them (Latessa, 2006). The Strategy of Choices can work in scripted skills training programs and others, provided that facilitators of these programs are willing to engage with offenders in the same way and to the same extent as they ask offenders to engage with them.

Nevertheless, this book poses a fundamentally different alternative. The authors demand engagement from offenders as a condition of their participation in treatment (this is the underlying meaning of the Strategy of Choices), but this works only to the extent that we are willing to engage with them. Offenders do not come to us as “good students.” Their disposition is not to cooperate, but to defy. Our engagement with offenders starts with our interest and curiosity about how they experience the world, and with our offer to support them and collaborate with them in a shared project. Our interest and our willingness to collaborate need to be genuine. It needs to be meaningful to both them and us. It is personal.

In the next chapter we turn to the authors’ program, Cognitive Self Change. In Cognitive Self Change we focus ours and offenders’ attention directly on the attitudes and ways of thinking that lie most close to the heart of their offending behavior, and we keep that focus of attention throughout their course of treatment.

Notes

1 See McMurran (2002) for a discussion of this issue.

2 Well-managed prisons keep the problem under control, but this occurs only when and if prison administrators recognize that there is a potential problem to be managed. In his famous Stanford prison experiment, Zimbardo (2007) assigned students to the roles of prisoners and guards and left them to work out the details of their relationship. Guards became sadistic, prisoners became stressed, and the experiment had to be terminated. But its results have never been refuted. Zimbardo described Abu Ghraib, the American prison in Iraq where acts of sadistic brutality were documented and widely publicized. We base our conclusions not on these kind of exceptional examples, but on the commonplace experience of ordinary prisons. The phenomenon is widely recognized and not seriously disputed. The authors take the phenomenon of “us versus them” as one of their premises and starting points for intervention.

3 In this discussion the now-popular strategy of “restorative justice” deserves mention. As with our comments regarding Motivational Interviewing, the authors find much to admire and agree with in restorative justice, most particularly its abandonment of punishment as the primary mode of intervention.

4 In a study of Massachusetts re-entry programs, LeClair and Guarino-Ghezzi (1992) recommended that offenders’ risk calculation and level of supervision be lowered for their participation in treatment in proportion to the statistical effectiveness of that treatment. The authors see this formula (or something close to it) as a realistic balance for all concerned. Keeping in mind that offenders will (correctly) perceive the offer of reduced punishment in exchange for participating in treatment as a threat of punishment if they do not, the option of treatment within these relatively modest bounds can still be presented to offenders as a genuine choice.

5 Cognitive Self Change is not psychotherapy and does not deal with offending behaviors unknown to the authorities. Most corrections officers will not be able to deliver more clinical forms of treatment, or treatment that requires clients to share information they want to keep secret from authorities. The point here is that officers’ role as enforcers of the rules does not disqualify them from participating, actively and meaningfully, in offender treatment. On the contrary, their authority puts them in a unique position of potential effectiveness.

6 The principle of unconditional respect is the sole and conspicuous exception to our otherwise scrupulous avoidance of moral value judgments. Respect is a necessary condition of productive communication and collaboration. When respect is defined in conditional terms (“I respect others as long as they respect me”) it turns into a formula for contempt. (“He disrespected me so I have the right to … [do whatever].”) In our experience, even the most hard-core offenders understand the idea of unconditional respect and accept it, even welcome it. By making unconditional respect a program rule, we insert this basic moral value at the foundation and very beginning of treatment.