Focus Groups for Criminal Offenders

¶ … Focus Groups for Criminal Offenders

I am interested in the fact that today's jail system faces an unusually high degree of recidivism (U.S. Department of Justice Statistics, 2007) despite all attempts to reduce it and despite the fact that we seemingly live in a more 'progressive' era with far more care taken to prevent and impede injustice and with numerous projects implemented to control poverty. Memoirs and reports that I have come across in relation to offenders indicates that, all too often, offenders who receive therapy are made independent on the counselor and, once paroled, are unable to think independently and, consequently, revert to their original habits. This seems to me to be a common problem in psychotherapy, whether in or out of the jail system, but it is within the jail context that this interests me most.

Counseling, as I see it, involves the problem that counselor and client ontologically perceive the world from totally different perspectives. Even the allegedly nondirective climate of Rogerian empathy equivocates translating the other's predicament into the therapist's own experience. One could defend counseling by maintaining -- as the Johari Window does -- that the counselor supplies shortcomings and insights that remain concealed or overlooked by the client (Nelson-Jones, 1983), but the essential situation remains: The therapist perceives the client according to her personal perceptions and particular therapeutic model (Heaton, 1976), influences the client to therapist's own values (Tedeschi & O'Donovan, 1971), and is restricted by her positional power from "comprehending how [the] other [person] sees, thinks, and feels" (Galinsky et al., 2006, p.1068). For reduction of violence, therefore, it seems to me that he who knows himself best should counsel himself; in other words, that potential offenders and offenders should identify and implement their own solutions, rather than having solutions imposed on them from an outside source who, however professional and "caring" he may be, nevertheless interprets, projects, and helps client render experiences into a narrative rather than as reality (Spence, 1982).

This is my question:

1.

Negative experience, chaos, emotions, obfuscates clear thinking. Can we step beyond this to attain the clear-sightedness necessary for finding and implementing our own solutions?

Finding the solution to this will help the client in general and the client in jail in particular to develop his or her own solution to her problems.

Operationalizing the above question would involve conceptualizing the concept of 'evaluation' or 'affect' i.e. emotions that pervert our thinking, as well as clearly defining all related sorts of elements that similarly cloud our thinking (this includes, but may not necessarily be limited to, socialization, environment, historical period, geographical locality and so forth). I would have to think about this, conduct a lot of reading and research and then possibly find instruments to measure these various constructs.

I would also have to operationalize the concept of 'clear thinking' elaborating on what I really mean in this context. As rough attempt at the moment, I intend rational thought that sees reality in a correspondence manner and does not pervert it by naive realism, wishes or other mental shortfalls.

Rudimentary research study

Most reasoning experiments have been conducted in a laboratory environment with college students. Most, if not all, cognitive experiments are structured according to logic principles with normative logic in mind. I would like to deviate from that pattern, testing the reasoning of 'ordinary' people of various ages, professions, and backgrounds, observing their reasoning in their natural environment, with my studies undefined and not constrained by principles of logic. Employing qualitative research, I would conduct a focus group (minimum, 8-12 participants for 1 hour) where one session would feature a particularly controversial discussion conducted using active listening and almost passive involvement enabling participants to free-associate and emote, followed by the same issue reduced to its H.P. fundamentals using If.. Then connectives validated according to real life instances. I would then present participants with a questionnaire regarding their experiences of the sessions, involving questions such as which type of exercise / discussion they felt to be more useful, which empowered them more, and which produced greater action-oriented processing.

I would use a focus group for various reasons: Focus groups are helpful in evaluation research or in understanding how people regard a specific experience or event (Krueger, 1994). More importantly, focus groups have the advantages of flexibility, economy of time, and direct contact between researchers and participants.

Hypothesis

Human reasoning is conducted in terms of cycles of rule-based If/Then/Therefore hypothetico-predictive (H.P.) reasoning, presumably because the brain is "hard-wired" to process information in this way (Sternberg, 2001). My idea, therefore, is that individuals may achieve independent reasoning by reducing problems to their very core (i.e. p and q exist -- or my mother murdered my aunt -- what should I do); brainstorming solutions (s, t, u, v; e.g. 'killing her, reporting her to police and so forth); assessing these solution according to Reality (thereby averting impact of emotions) ("if p then q") followed by comparing the expected conclusion with predicted reality. Going to the core of the matter may not only help clients, in general, achieve independent solutions to their problems, but may also reduce recidivism that frequently (although not always) occurs as a result of weak problem and decision making ability.

Part 2

According to Office of Policy and Management for Criminal Justice rates of Recidivism for offenders are approximately the same across the United States (U.S. Department of Justice (USDOJ), 2010). Some of the statistics in the 2010 report state that within the first three years of release from incarceration due to discharge over 2/3 are arrested again. Over 50% of them face conviction due to a new crime. More than half of the criminals are sent back to prison for a new crime serving another sentence.