A randomised controlled trial of a cognitive skills programme for offenders with mental illness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Interventions for offenders with mental illness have tended to be confined to treatment of illness, with the expectation that symptom reduction will be accompanied by reduced criminal recidivism, but recent evidence suggests that other treatment targets may be more effective against recidivism. AIM: The aim of this study was to examine the effect of a cognitive skills programme (Reasoning and Rehabilitation 2: Short Version for Adults [R&R2]) among offenders with mental illness. Our first hypothesis was that participation in this programme would result in significantly greater improvement in antisocial attitudes than among similar prisoners who did not participate; both groups received "treatment as usual" (TAU). Our second hypothesis was that those receiving R&R2 would show less post-treatment violent or general recidivism than those receiving TAU alone. METHOD: Incarcerated offenders with serious mental illness (N = 101) were randomly assigned to R&R2 or TAU alone. Criminal attitudes and mental state were examined before and after treatment. Violent and non-violent recidivism was measured, on average, 18 months after release. RESULTS: In both intervention and TAU alone trial arms, there were significant pre- to post-treatment changes in criminal attitudes and symptoms or signs of mental disorder. There was no difference between groups in these respects. These pre/post changes were not associated with reductions in recidivism over time, whether or not controlling for baseline risk. CONCLUSIONS: Although there was no demonstrable advantage of R&R2 over TAU alone, non-significant trends towards lower violent recidivism in the R&R2 group and general recidivism in the TAU group suggest that it may be worth repeating the trial in a larger sample with more differentiated control groups.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
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".