A RELAPSE PREVENTION APPROACH TO REDUCING AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOUR
Peter Prisgrove, Clinical Psychologist, Western Australian Department of Corrective Services

P. Prisgrove, « A relapse prevention approach to reducing aggressive behavior, » Serious Violent Offenders: Sentencing, Psychiatry and Law Reform, S. A. Gerrull and W. Lucas, Eds. (Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 1993).

Applying a Relapse Prevention Model in a Correctional System
RP approaches are particularly viable within a correctional framework. The reasons for this span the areas of correctional philosophy, policy and practice. From a philosophical point of view, there is a growing community impatience with an approach that puts expensive correctional resources into servicing the psychotherapeutic needs of violent offenders at the expense, as it is perceived, of services to the victims. The focus of RP methods on the reduction of violent behaviour rather than on broader psychotherapeutic goals is therefore attractive. In addition, some broader psychotherapeutic approaches tend to see offenders as being themselves the victims of their developmental histories, and thereby imply a lessened capacity for self-determination and culpability. The RP approach maintains a clear focus on the offender as fully responsible for their behaviour and for maintaining their efforts to improve it.
The rehabilitation ideal has taken a battering over the last two decades and in its current form asserts that nothing works for everybody, but that some interventions are effective for particular offender groups (Gendreau & Ross 1987). The RP emphasis on identifying each offender’s idiosyncratic offence pattern(s) and identifying what will achieve change for them is consistent with this ‘some things work for some people’ approach.
It has been suggested that some forms of programs for offenders tend to be built around a somewhat middle class view of the world and therapeutic style. Because an RP approach requires each offender to be fully involved in identifying the patterns of events and behaviour that does in fact lead to particular
offences, and then identify the ways in which these sequences could be coped with in a non-offending manner, there is less room for workers to impose such an imperialistic framework on offending clients.

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