The good lives model and conceptual issues in offender rehabilitation

There has been a profound shift in attitudes toward offender rehabilitation in the last two decades from a conviction that nothing works to the confident announcement that certain kinds of treatment strategies reliably reduce reoffending rates. The treatment approach currently dominant in the corrections area is the risk–need model where dynamic risk factors associated with recidivism are systematically targeted in treatment and the intensity (i.e. dose) of treatment delivered is related to each offender's assessed level of risk. It is our view that despite the undoubted virtues of the risk–need model there are a number of important conceptual issues that are not adequately addressed by this approach. In this…