CHAPTER THREE :

BEHAVIOURAL CHANGES FOLLOWING COMPLETION OF THE CORE PROGRAMME

DANNY CLARK

The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour. Thus how offenders behave in prison should give an indication of their behaviour after release. Evidence for the connection between prison behaviour and community behaviour comes both

One might question whether sexual offenders will be able to demonstrate facets of their behaviour in quite the same way as other groups given their restricted access to victims and the limitations of the prison regime. However, sexual offending often involves many non-sexual precursors such as anger, social isolation and tack of impulse control.

In fact, as compared to other prisoners, the prison behaviour of sexual offenders shows them to

In addition, men who offend against adult females tend to show more inappropriate attitudes and behaviour towards women in prison, whilst those who offend against children are more likely to try to contact children and to collect pictures of children.

Drawing on these observations and other studies of prison behaviour a checklist has been constructed for prison officers to routinely record relevant aspects of prison behaviour. This has been applied to 178 sex offenders held in prisons running the sex offender treatment programme.

Factor analysis has been used to identify distinct dimensions of prisoner behaviour and it has proved possible to create ratings scales for dimensions of

Inter-rater reliability for these scales has been between 0.6 and 0.9. These dimensions of observed behaviour are also found to correlate in meaningful ways with prisoners' responses to personality and attitude questionnaires.

For example, the (inappropriate) Sexual Interest dimension of prison behaviour was the only behavioural scale to correlate with questionnaire measures of endorsement of rape myths or justifications for child-sex.

At a number of prisons running the Sex Offender Treatment Programme these checklists have been applied so that the effect of the Core Programme on prisoner behaviour can be examined.

METHOD

Sample

92 sex offenders who completed the Core Programme at 4 different prisons.

Data Collection

Prison officers used the behaviour checklist to record prisoners' behaviour before they began the Core Programme and then again about three months after the programme was over.

RESULTS

Table 1 below shows the proportion of sex offenders getting worse, getting better, or not changing on each of these dimensions of prison behaviour.
 

Table 1: Changes in Prison Behaviour after Completion of the Core Programme

Variable

Percent worse

Percent no change

Percent better

N

Significance level

Belligerence

Impulsiveness

Inappropriate Sexual Interest

Poor Coping

Withdrawal

As the table shows there were statistically significant improvements in behaviour on all five dimensions. Most prisoners' behaviour seems either to have not changed or to have improved.

Note that the numbers of subjects involved differ depending on which scale is involved. This was because some of the prisons concerned were using an earlier version of the checklist for which some scales could not be scored.

CONCLUSION

Overall these results are clearly encouraging, sex offenders' prison behaviour changes in desirable ways after completion of the Core Programme indicating that the programme is changing more than verbally expressed attitudes or behaviour within the treatment group.

These general trends do, however hide important differences. The results are based on data from four prisons. In fact the pattern of changes is not the same at all prisons and also differs from one treatment group to another even within the same prison. Future research will need to examine why these different patterns of change occur.

REFERENCES

Clark, D. A. McDougall, C. & Fisher, M.J. (1993) A new methodology for assessing the level of risk in incarcerated offenders. 'British Journal of Criminology' 33, 436-449.

Zamble, E. & Porporino, F. (1990) Coping, imprisonment and rehabilitation.
'Criminal Justice and Behaviour.' 17, 53-78.