Sunday, 16 January 2005 - 8:45 AM

This presentation is part of: Services for Criminal Offenders

I Am My Brother's Keeper: Mutual Aid Behavior in a Correctional Therapeutic Community as a Predictor of Reincarceration

Purpose: The cost of untreated addictions is staggering. According the U.S. Department of Justice, 57% inmates are serving time for a drug-related offense and 36% offenders report drinking at the time of their offense. 70% of drug offenders were rearrested within 3 years of their release from prison. In addition, there are emotional, financial, and social burdens on the children and families of these offenders.

Efforts and innovations designed to address substance-abusing offenders have included the therapeutic community modality. This modality strongly emphasizes the importance of mutual aid between community residents (DeLeon, 2000).

The purpose of this study is to test the significance of mutual aid activities within a therapeutic community based in the corrections system as predictors of criminal reincarceration following graduation.

Methods: Mutual aid was operationalized as the number of incidents of positive and negative feedback which each graduate gave or received during his residency in the program. Logarithms of these variables were taken to eliminate outliers. Models controlled for age of participant and likelihood of reoffense upon program entry as predicted by the Level of Service Inventory (Revised) (Andrews & Bonna, 1995). Reincarceration following graduation was tracked during the period of the study, between January 2002 and January 2004. Since this is a bivariate dependent variable, logistic regression was used in analysis.

A random sample of eighty participants was selected from the pool of 459 successful graduates who successfully graduated from the facility between January 2002 and June 2003. All facility residents and therefore graduates are male. The sample was stratified so as to include forty graduates who had been reincarcerated and forty who had not.

Results: Because of concerns about collinearity, each measure of mutual aid was modeled separately as a predictor of reincarceration, controlling for age of participant and entry LSIR score, and a Bonferroni correction was applied. Thus, the p level at which the null hypothesis was rejected was .0125. Positive feedback given (p = .002), positive feedback received (p = .003), negative feedback given (p = .008) and negative feedback received (p = .006) were all statistically significant by this criterion.

Implications: This study supports the importance of mutual aid as a predictor of reincarceration following graduation from a therapeutic community. This is of importance for two reasons. First, it lends empirical support to the theoretical framework underlying therapeutic community treatment. Second, the study directs practitioner attention beyond program completion to a focus on the number of mutual aid behaviors that a resident performs and receives while in a therapeutic community.

Andrews, D. A. & Bonta, J. L. (1995). The level of service inventory—revised. Toronto, Ontario: Multi-Health Systems.

De Leon, G. (2000). The therapeutic community: Theory, model and method. New York: Springer Publishing Company.

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