NCJ Number
120653
Date Published
1990
Length
20 pages
Annotation
The Wisconsin Drug Abuse Treatment Unit (DATU) has a record of successfully reducing recidivism among hard-core felony offenders by combining the structure and principles of the therapeutic community drug treatment model with the personality developed by Yochelson and Samenow.
Abstract
The therapeutic community regards drug abuse as a deviant behavior, the recovery from which is the individual's responsibility; this can be achieved through compliance, conformity, and commitment. The theory of criminal personality outlines a three-stage process through which offenders recognize their thinking errors, learn to distinguish functional from dysfunctional thoughts, and train themselves to apply correctives for each thinking error. The inmates at DATU are carefully screened to fit the program parameters. The program itself consists of four resident statuses; in each phase, tools for confronting and correcting dysfunctional and disruptive behavior are employed. As measured by the percentage of parsticipants who reenter the Wisconsin criminal justice system, the DATU can be an effective program for rehabilitating this category of offender. 4 references