Cognitive Self Change: How Offenders Experience the World and What We Can Do About It

Antisocial and anti-authority attitudes that lead to criminal behavior pose special challenges for treatment. Understanding how offenders think and how they experience the world is the first step to helping them change. De-incentivizing criminal behavior, and helping replace it with self-empowered change, are the keys to upending the traditionally antagonistic relationship between criminals and those meant to help them change.

The authors, with their experience of both working with offenders and implementing rehabilitation programs, have drawn together clinical and academic perspectives on the treatment of prolific and persistent offenders, and offenders meeting the diagnostic criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder, analyzing current approaches to treatment and the problems encountered in their application.

They focus on high-risk and the most "hard-core" offenders, not just those that "are ready to change". They discuss why offenders offend, why they are seldom motivated to change, and why they often fail to engage in treatment, leading to a strategy of communication that teaches offenders a set of skills that they can use to change themselves, and that motivates them to do so.

Cognitive Self Change rejects the traditional dichotomy of control versus treatment, devising instead a strategy that integrates both.