Practice Goals/Target Population
Rehabilitation programs are designed to reduce recidivism among adults who have been convicted of an offense by improving their behaviors, skills, mental health, social functioning, and access to education and employment. They may become participants in rehabilitation programs during multiple points in their involvement with the criminal justice system, and programs are typically provided in conjunction with some form of sanction (e.g., incarceration or probation). Therefore, most programs are delivered within correctional settings while the person completes his or her sentence, or in community settings following the their release (i.e., probation or parole-based programs). Community-based settings may be delivered in inpatient facilities such as psychiatric hospitals and outpatient treatment centers, or in supportive residential housing such as halfway houses. In addition, some rehabilitation programs (such as drug courts) serve as alternatives to incarceration, diverting them into services in the community rather than into correctional facilities.
Practice Components
Rehabilitation programs do not generally follow a common, well-defined treatment protocol (Lipsey and Cullen 2007). Instead, interventions and services may vary significantly by program. All programs address at least one of the risk factors commonly associated with offending (such as mental health status, substance use, education level, or employment status). For example, a drug court program may provide a person who has been convicted of an offense with treatment only to address substance abuse issues related to his or her offending. More commonly, however, rehabilitation programs combine multiple services: for example, a drug court program that provides an individual not only with substance abuse treatment, but also with individual counseling and vocational training.
The general types of treatment services provided by rehabilitation programs include group work (structured via protocol or psychoeducational content); cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or CBT-like components (thinking skills, relapse prevention, or anger management); counseling (group, individual, mentoring); academic work (GED or college classes); employment-related (work-release, job placement, vocational training); supportive residential (therapeutic community, halfway house); drug court or other specialized court; multimodal, mixed treatments (individual case management); intensive supervision (reduced probation or parole); or restorative interventions (mediation, reparations, community service, victim-offender conferencing).
Practice Theory
Effective rehabilitation programs typically use treatment methods that are based on behavioral and social learning theories of change. Behavioral theory suggests that individuals are conditioned to behave in a certain way based on experiences with reinforcement and punishment (Skinner 1965). In contrast, social learning theory posits that people learn behaviors from one another, through observation, imitation, and modeling (Bandura 1997). Therefore, rehabilitation programs are designed to reduce criminal behaviors through the positive reinforcement of conventional behaviors learned through observation or modeling (Lipsey and Cullen 2007). For example, a program may help a participant learn how to manage his or her anger by modeling appropriate responses instead.
