Criminal Justice and Behavior

The history of the American Association for Correctional Psychology (AACP) is traced from 1954 to the present. The article offers some insights into the beginnings and development of correctional psychology in the United States, including those individuals most influential in that development. The history of AACP publications is also outlined, including the newsletter Correctional Psychologist and the scholarly journal Criminal Justice and Behavior. An entire list of AACP presidents is provided.

In recent decades, prison populations and prison construction both have increased dramatically bringing issues related to prison siting to the forefront. Although the Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) syndrome often is discussed in prison literature, relatively little empirical research has been devoted to this topic. Based on a survey of residents in a county in which construction of a new prison was just beginning, this article focuses on the perceived impact of the new prison on future crime and personal and community safety. Consistent with the literature, proximity to the prison and several demographic variables were significant predictors of perceptions of prison impact. However, concerns about prison visitors coming into the community had the strongest impact on these perceptions.

Prior reviews and meta-analyses have supported the hypothesis that offender rehabilitation programs based on cognitive-behavioral principles reduce recidivism. This article quantitatively synthesizes the extant empirical evidence on the effectiveness of structured cognitive-behavioral programs delivered to groups of offenders. The evidence summarized supports the claim that these treatments are effective at reducing criminal behavior among convicted offenders. All higher quality studies reported positive effects favoring the cognitive-behavioral treatment program. Specifically, positive reductions in recidivism were observed for moral reconation therapy, reasoning and rehabilitation, and various cognitive-restructuring programs. The evidence suggests the effectiveness of cognitive skills and cognitive restructuring approaches as well as programs that emphasize moral teachings and reasoning.

The Bay Area Services Network (BASN) provides case management, drug abuse treatment, and links to other health/social services for drug-involved parolees in the San Francisco Bay Area. In a quasi-experimental evaluation, the authors found no difference between BASN and comparison parolees in treatment duration, access to health/social services, drug use days, or criminal recidivism. However, mean scores for dose of case management (number of contacts with case manager) and treatment duration were low among BASN parolees overall. In analyses using BASN parolees only, the authors found those with a stronger case management dose reported fewer drug use days and property offenses. These findings persisted when self-reported abstinence motivation was controlled for as a proxy for self-selection. The effect of case management dose on drug use days was mediated by treatment duration. BASN case management may have had favorable effects on recidivism and drug use when delivered in a sufficient dose.

A nonlinear, exemplar-based empirical modeling methodology was applied to the problem of classifying relative levels of recidivism risk in a population of released offenders from the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. Issues related to extracting relatively pure classes of exemplars from relatively ambiguous data are detailed. Risk was defined as the associative match to one of two exemplar groups; higher or lower risk offenders. The area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve for 620 offenders examined in the initial subgroup was .94. Comparable results were found with a smaller validation sample of 408 offenders known to be higher risk. Implications of controlling for risk factor patterns are discussed.