Culture, healing and spirituality and their influence on treatment programs for aboriginal offenders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigated the role of culture, healing and spirituality in treatment programs for Aboriginal offenders. Aboriginal people have been profoundly affected by their contact with Europeans and one negative consequence is their over-representation in the Canadian Criminal Justice System (CJS) (Chisholm, 1994). In British Columbia, Aboriginal adults constitute approximately 5% of the population, but they represent 20% of those incarcerated; Aboriginals comprise 8% of the adult population in Saskatchewan, yet they constitute 76% of incarcerated individuals (Boe, 2000). By virtue of their overrepresentation, Aboriginals present as a special interest group in the CJS. As the Correctional Services of Canada (CSC) implements a number of treatment programs that Aboriginal inmates have an opportunity to attend (CSC webpage, www.csc-scc.gc.ca), knowledge of the effectiveness of these programs is important. A total of 50 offenders participated in the study: 40 Aboriginal men and 10 non-Aboriginal men. Participants were required to fill out a research package consisting of the following components: a consent form, a background information questionnaire, a treatment/program involvement questionnaire, the Native American Acculturation Scale, and the Balanced Inventory for Desired Responding. The results of the study support prior findings (Hodgson & Heckbert, 1994; Johnston, 1997; Waldram, 1993) indicating that spirituality, culture and practicing traditions are fundamental components of treatment programs for Aboriginal offenders. More specifically, many Aboriginal participants (52%) in this sample indicated that they considered Aboriginal programs effective because of their cultural and spiritual components. Additionally, Aboriginal participants reported that healing contributed to treatment effectiveness for both Aboriginal programs (44%) and, to a lesser extent, non Aboriginal programs (18.5%). Furthermore, an encouraging discovery was that these participants reported that Aboriginal programs are, in their view, moderately (28%) to highly (40%) likely to decrease their recidivism. Additionally, Aboriginal participants also reported that they most often solicit assistance and support from Aboriginal people when experiencing personal problems (92.5%), institutional problems (85%) and consider Aboriginal people to be the most supportive people (90%). Although results indicated that it is necessary for CSC to be culturally sensitive in accommodating Aboriginal offenders, further research is required to investigate the actual, as opposed to perceived, effectiveness of current Aboriginal programs operating at CSC, as well as assisting in designing and implementing future programs and activities that are culturally appropriate.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".