Prison Treatment and Parole Survival: An Empirical Assessment

Rossi: "It is obvious that any program consists not only of the treatment intended to be delivered, but it also consists of the delivery system and whatever is done to clients in the delivery of services. Thus the income maintenance experiments' treatments consist not only of the payments, but the entire system of monthly income reports required of the clients, [pg16] the quarterly interviews and the annual income reviews, as well as the payment system and its rules. In that particular case, it is likely that the payments dominated the payment system, but in other cases that might not be so, with the delivery system profoundly altering the impact of the treatment. Perhaps the most egregious example was the group counseling program run in California prisons during the 1960s (Kassebaum, Ward, and Wilner, 1972). Guards and other prison employees were used as counseling group leaders, in sessions in which all participants - prisoners and guards - were asked to be frank and candid with each other! There are many reasons for the abysmal failure of this program to affect either criminals' behavior within prison or during their subsequent period of parole, but among the leading contenders for the role of villain was the prison system's use of guards as therapists. [This is a complex example in which there are many competing explanations for the failure of the program. In the first place, the program may be a good example of the failure of problem theory since the program was ultimately based on a theory of criminal behavior as psychopathology. In the second place, the program theory may have been at fault for employing counseling as a treatment. This example illustrates how difficult it is to separate out the three sources of program failures in specific instances.]"