Cognitive Self Change: How Offenders Experience the World and What We Can Do About It

Authors: Jack Bush (Author)

Language: English

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Publication Date: May 31, 2016

Print Length: 208 pages

Description:

Cognitive Self Change offers a practical guide to rehabilitation by delving into the unique ways in which individual offenders perceive themselves and their environment at the moment of their offending behavior. The book focuses on de-incentivizing criminal actions and fostering self-empowered change, aiming to transform the often antagonistic relationship between criminals and those tasked with helping them reform.

Based on the authors’ extensive experience working with high-risk offenders and implementing rehabilitation programs, this work synthesizes both clinical and academic perspectives. It critically analyzes current approaches to treatment and identifies the challenges in their application, providing readers with a comprehensive understanding of effective strategies for offender rehabilitation.

“The consensus amongst the leading researchers in the offender treatment area is that the comprehensive and sophisticated clinical methods the authors have derived for offender treatment are unsurpassed. Indeed, they have formed the basis for what is known as the core correctional practices for reducing anti-social behavior.” – Paul Gendreau, Professor Emeritus, University of New Brunswick

“Bush and colleagues’ phenomenologically based approach to offender rehabilitation is based explicitly on the stories they have collected from prisoners and probationers and is a welcome contribution to an academic literature that too often obfuscates the actual work involved in delivering help to the hardest to reach in the criminal justice system.” – Shadd Maruna, Ph.D., Dean of the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice