ABSTRACT
In the decade since the advent of the millennium, therapeutic and rehabilitative interventions for offenders have proliferated in many jurisdictions and the confidence of forensic and clinical practitioners appears to have grown. Proliferation and confidence are likely to be a product, in part, of the substantial evidence base that has become available, indicating that treatment and rehabilitation programmes can indeed have an impact in changing important outcomes, such as recidivism, and suggesting that positive outcomes are associated with particular features of programmes, such as attention to the ‘risk, needs and responsivity principles’ (Andrews and Bonta, 2006; Hollin and Palmer, 2006, Ward and Maruna 2007). The growth in confidence has had a number of positive effects. One of the latter has been the emergence of healthy conceptual and empirical critiques of the What Works movement (Ward and Maruna 2007), another has been the development of what might be termed a positive psychology perspective on the goals of treatment and rehabilitation, with an emphasis on ‘good lives’ (Ward and Brown 2004).
