ABSTRACT
The Good Lives Model (GLM) is a contemporary theory of offender rehabilitation that emphasises the dual aims of risk reduction and well-being enhancement. The GLM focuses on promoting and building the offender’s personal goals and strengths respectively, as well as to reduce and manage his or her risk for future offending. In fact, the GLM is designed to augment principles of effective correctional intervention, and it is complementary to the Risk–Need–Responsivity model (RNR; Andrews and Bonta 2010: 45–52). With regard to desistance, proponents of the RNR model argued that the model recognises the importance of narrative identity, social ecology and development trajectories, but prefers an active and empirically supported model of offender rehabilitation (Andrews et al. 2011). Preliminary research evidence suggests that the GLM may enhance RNR-based approaches, especially pertaining to increasing client engagement in treatment while also targeting risk issues (Gannon et al. 2011; Simons et al. 2006). Most practical illustrations of the GLM focus on its application with sexual offending (for exceptions see Barnao et al. 2010; Whitehead et al. 2007). The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate its application in practice with a youth who engaged in fire setting. The GLM has been written about extensively elsewhere, and therefore only a short summary of the rehabilitation model will be provided here (see Laws and Ward (2011) for a detailed description of the GLM).
