Recidivism Treatment Manuals: A Corpus-based Examination for Public Offender Counselors

Abstract

Incarceration rates in the U.S. reflect racial disparities, with individuals of color incarcerated over five times the rate of non-Hispanic White males. From a behavioral health perspective, incarceration and recidivism rates are a social justice imperative for clinicians and counselor educators that require purposeful academic research and clinical practices (Chang et al., 2010). The study examined the literature on evidence-based treatment manuals targeting recidivism. The linguistic examination of the literature and therapeutic interventions is vital for the counseling field and for the members of our nation to remain incarceration-free. This study employed a synchronic corpus linguistics design (Brezina, 2018). The corpuses were two recidivism prevention program manuals. The level of measure for keyness and collocation were continuous and nominal. The unit of analysis was single words (Bjekić et al., 2014). Words occurring with greater frequency in Cognitive Behavioral Interventions for Offenders Core Adult (CBI-CA) were “module” and “success,” and those with less frequency were “lesson” and “supplement.” The word network of the strongest positive keyword “module” in CBI-CA were “session” and “worksheet.” The strongest collocates of the word stem “crim*” in CBI-CA were “people” and “mental.” The strongest collocates of the word stem “crim*” Thinking for a Change (T4C) were “systems” and “justice.” The study compared the words used with greater and lesser frequency in the CBI-CA manual to those in the T4C recidivism prevention program manual. The study also identified the word network with the strongest positive keyness in the CBI-CA manual and examined the word network of the word stem “crim*” in CBI-CA and T4C manuals.