Just to be very brief, we now know that the most effective treatments have certain characteristics.
The first characteristic is that the treatment has to be of the appropriate intensity or frequency for the risk level of the offender, so higher-risk offenders require much more intensive long periods of treatment. In fact, low-risk offenders who receive intensive treatment show either no impact on recidivism or it actually makes them worse.
Second, we know what should be the targets of treatment: what should treatment programs be focused on? They are those risk factors that I spoke about before—pro-criminal thinking, social networks. It used to be thought that things like self-esteem were important. We now know that treatment programs targeting self-esteem only produce confident criminals.
We also know the third important factor is that the cognitive behavioural programs are by far the most effective. There are very many different counselling treatment approaches. If we have a treatment program that focuses on high-risk offenders, focuses on what we call criminogenic needs and on appropriate risk factors, and does so in a cognitive behavioural fashion, the research literature indicates, on average, a 30% reduction in recidivism when those programs are delivered in the community. The very same programs delivered within institutions have about a 20% reduction in recidivism. It tells us that the same program placed in the community is more effective than the program in an institution.