NCJ Number
79166
Journal
Journal of Offender Counseling Volume: 1 Issue: 2 Dated: (April 1981) Pages: 35-40
Date Published
1981
Length
6 pages
Annotation
Findings are presented from a study of the efficacy of counseling in reducing the frequency and severity of incident reports in a Narcotic Addict Rehabilitation Act (NARA) unit.
Abstract
A sample of 44 residents of a NARA unit with 'guilty' charges indicated on incident reports was selected, along with an equal number of residents found 'not guilty' of such charges. The institution's files were used to obtain the type and number of incident reports for each subject, and the NARA unit files were used to determine the extent of each subject's involvement in counseling services. Counseling services were classified as individual, group, and vocational types. A resident involved in more than one type of counseling was counted in each. So as to determine differences between the three counseling conditions and the noncounseling condition, t-tests of the number of incident reports were performed. Of the 88 residents in the study, 43 were involved in some type of counseling; of the 43 involved in counseling, 35 were involved in individual, 13 in group, and 16 in vocational counseling. Findings show that the residents who were counseled had fewer incident reports than counterparts not counseled. Generalizations about the most effective type of counseling cannot be made because of the low numbers of persons involved in group and vocational counseling. While it cannot be unequivocally stated that counseling was the causal factor in lowering the rate of incident reports, the encouraging findings suggest that the use of a more sophisticated design to test the effectiveness of counseling would be worthwhile. Tabular data and three references are provided.