The Criminal Justice System: A Step Forward

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itself.

Continuously locking up offenders does not make them productive in a correctional facility or outside of it. While they are in the correctional facility, offenders are haphazardly receiving any form of punishment or correction. Although having stricter and consistent facilities would be an option in reformation, CBT would ensure that these broken beings could become more productive than they have ever been and also diminishing their chances of recidivating. CBT would be costly to implement and it would be difficult gathering commitment from the offender and as well as the therapist, but in the long run benefits would exceed the cost if done properly.

An individual’s thought processes are often the result of experience, and behavior is often influenced and reflected by the way one thinks. Additionally, thoughts may sometimes become distorted and fail to reflect reality accurately. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy focuses on encouraging patients to challenge distorted cognitions and change destructive patterns of behavior, such as certain ‘trigger’ situations. An accumulation of 568 total studies conducted by Nana Landenberger and Mark Lipsey from Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies, performed a meta-analysis of 58 experimental and quasi-experimental studies of the effects of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy on the recidivism of both adult and juvenile offenders confirmed prior positive findings and explored a range of moderators to identify factors associated with variation in treatment affects. The results showed that the odds of recidivating for offenders receiving CBT were only about 55% of that for offenders in control groups. Lipsey and Landenberger then focused further on an updated and overlapping set of fourteen randomized experiments and found that the mean recidivism for the treatment groups in those studies was 27% lower than that of the control groups (50%). Specifically, in an assessment mechanism suggesting if the criminal was a low, moderate, or high risk of recidivating, the results further showed that the moderate risk individuals are most likely to benefit from CBT. Those who are high risk and the others who are low risk are conversely least likely to benefit from CBT programs. Accordingly, neither of the aforementioned populations should be recommended for treatment. Rather, a person of moderate risk should be recommended for CBT.

Although some correctional agencies have rehabilitative programs such as CBT, its applications are merely optional. The current criminal justice system has its own defining usage of “rehabilitation” through imprisonment, and the approach is clearly not working. Scholarly studies done on CBT show that the overall effect of recidivism will reduce greatly and that moderate risk individuals are guaranteed benefit from CBT. This analysis therefore, leads to the conclusion that in order to solve a major flaw in the criminal justice system, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy should be required in correctional sanctions to those moderately at risk to recidivate.

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