Transforming Environments and Offender Rehabilitation: A Guide for Practitioners in Forensic Settings and Criminal Justice

How can an offender’s environment play a role in assisting and sustaining personal? Can a failure to address an offender’s contextual issues reduce or undermine the effectiveness of clinical intervention? Bringing together a range of leading forensic psychologists and drawing on various innovative and unifying directions for research, practice and theory, this book explores the inter-relationships between structured programmes, other forensic interventions and the environment in which these programmes and interventions take place.

The book examines how the environment can be better utilised to contribute to processes of change and how therapeutic principles and practices can be more strongly embedded through being applied in supportive, facilitative environments. In addition, it expands on emerging conceptualisations of how psychological functioning and environmental context are inextricably linked and offers an alternative to prevailing "essentialist" views of areas such as personality and cognition.

Providing new and challenging insights and perspectives on issues of central relevance to forensic psychology and related disciplines, this book contributes to the development of innovative and unifying directions for research, practice and theory. This book will be an essential resource for those who work with or intend to work with offenders, particularly practitioners, researchers and students in the fields of psychology, criminology, psychiatry, psychotherapy and social work.