Keeping a Respectful Eye on Crime Prevention: A Response to Birgden
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is much in the work of Dr. Astrid Birgden that we admire. Birgden (2004) opened Andrews's eyes to our inattention to respect for personal autonomy as a basic value underlying our psychology of criminal conduct and the RNR approach. That will be corrected in the fifth edition of Andrews and Bonta. In addition, making human rights part of a model of rehabilitation is a very attractive idea. explicit statement of human rights may prove to be much stronger and more prescriptive than the RNR principle of ethical, legal, just, humane, and otherwise normative applications. We look forward to studying her forthcoming normative framework for forensic psychologists. We also hope that future research will provide useful information in regard to motivational issues because current knowledge is limited. But that limited knowledge is not without value. For example, Chris Trotter (2004) has produced a model of social work practice with reluctant clients. That model builds directly on the risk-need-responsivity (RNR) principles of relationship and structuring skills. We have no interest in commenting upon the assumptions that Birgden says led to our dismissal of therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ). We did not and do not dismiss TJ. The main purpose of our article was to describe the RNR model, the underlying theory of human behaviour and its potential contribution to crime prevention in the context of justice. Responding to our article through promotion of therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) and the promotion of the Good Lives Model (GLM) misses the point. The phrase crime-prevention jurisprudence (CPJ) calls for a primary role for crime prevention without its being overridden by appeals to due process, just desert, retributive justice, restorative justice, and the enhanced well-being of offenders. Now Birgden (2009) has added the promotion of TJ and GLM to the list of ways of discounting the service objective of reduced recidivism. Of course, crime prevention through human service must be offered in a normative context! That is true for all human-service interventions, and it is not an invention of TJ or GLM. Ensuring autonomy will lead to enhanced engagement in offender rehabilitation and so enhanced community protection. Where is the evidence that autonomy leads to enhanced engagement? More importantly, even a casual review of our Table 3 (Andrews and Dowden 2007: 452) shows that engagement in programs that were not in adherence with RNR did not reduce recidivism. RNR users are encouraged to be collaborative and to target enhanced well-being for motivational and humanitarian reasons. However, if they seek reduced recidivism, it is best to also adhere to the key clinical principles within RNR (see Table 3, row 12 in Andrews and Dowden 2007: 452). There is no evidence that enhanced engagement in GLM-based rehabilitation enhances community safety. On the other hand, there is a wealth of evidence that participation in RNR programming is associated with reduced re-offending. An offender rehabilitation model that fails to address offender autonomy cannot claim to enhance well being or to be ethical, humane or respectful, states Birgden. She is utterly dismissive of the ability of human service, correctional, and forensic workers to enhance well-being and to implement RNR in a normative manner. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.037 | 0.093 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.037 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.080 | 0.143 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".