Criminal Psychology: Rehabilitating Offenders are there better methods to achieve this?

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Criminal Psychology: Rehabilitating Offenders - are there better methods to achieve this?

The author intends to describe token economy programmes as a rehabilitation package, describe anger management as a therapy including CALM as a current model of anger management and finally conclude by comparing both economy and anger management programmes as they are used to treat offenders, in terms of the principles on which they are based, their effectiveness and impact upon recidivism.

Token Economy

The principles of learning have not only been applied in the laboratory but have also been applied in many real-life settings, such as classrooms, mental hospitals and prisons; the use of operant conditioning in such real-world settings is called behavioural modification (Ewan Williams 2010).

Many behaviour modification programmes rely on a technique called the token economy, in which desirable behaviour, such as co-operation and compliance, is reinforced by the use of tokens. These tokens have no intrinsic value but can be changed for primary reinforcers, when used in prisons most of the programmes also involve negative reinforcement, the removal of something unpleasant, and punishment, the implementation of something unpleasant, in order to reduce undesirable behaviour such as non-compliance and aggression. Tokens