COGNITIVE BEHAVIOURAL PROGRAMMES IN DENMARK

The Canadian cognitive behavioural forerunner programme, Reasoning and Rehabilitation (Ross & Fabiano 1985), was first implemented and renamed as

‘Cognitive Skills’ in Ringe State prison and two other Danish prisons in 1994.

Cognitive Skills was partly implemented as a result of the strong ties between the Danish Prison Service and the Canadian Prison Service which was run by the Dane Ole Ingstrup. One of the ‘founding fathers’ of the programme, Elizabeth Fabiano,

22 Hudson distinguishes between present-day rehabilitation and the reformation of former times when she uses the concept ‘reform’ to describe ‘the nineteenth-century development of regimes designed to effect change in individuals through educative and contemplative techniques, and [….] ‘rehabilitation’ to signify the more individualistic treatment programmes that became established during the twentieth century’. (Hudson 2003:27 in Raynor & Robinson 2005:7)

taught Danish prison officers the principles of the programme, and after this the education and supervision of instructors as well as the practical management of the cognitive behavioural programme was taken over by the Staff Training Centre of the Danish Prison and Probation Service (Philip 1996). Curiously, the decision to buy and implement Cognitive Skills does not seem to reflect the same sort of overall strategy in the Danish Prison and Probation Service as was seen in the United Kingdom, where the ‘What Works’ project was initiated by the Chief Inspector of Probation in 1996, leading to numerous conferences on ‘What Works’

and being further cemented in two seminal reports (Kemshall 2002:46; Robinson 1999:424). Instead, it seems that the implementation of Cognitive Skills was haphazard and reliant upon the close bonds between the Danish Prison Service and the Canadian Prison Service, although the programme implementation corresponds well to other changes in the Danish penal field as described previously. Cognitive Skills was accredited by an independent accreditation board of academics and practitioners, five of them Danish and one Swedish,²³ in 2006, after which the manual was revised in 2008 (DfK 2012).

Despite the branding of the programme as a ‘brand new’ approach to rehabilitation, Smith (2006:117) shows how five of its allegedly new aspects (thought processes, free will, categorizations, diagnosis and confessions, and the cultivation of self-control) have many parallels to past rehabilitative logic in the Danish penal field.

Smith therefore argues that unreason has ‘always’ been treated with reason and morality, ‘criminal’ thoughts are replaced with ‘normal’ thoughts and so forth:

The prisoners have to learn to debate and reason morally. Nowadays it is not the chaplain and religion, but instead scientific psychological tools that are used in the name of improvement. An additional parallel to the past is that the cognitive treatment project almost rests upon a theory of

‘a criminal man’ who deviates from a not clearly defined normality as he or she lacks certain cognitive skills which manifest themselves in anti-social and criminal behaviour. The criminal shows in this respect a kind of pathological mental activity which allegedly can be cured through the right influence (Smith 2003:328, own translation).

The cognitive behavioural programmes thus seem to have landed in soil that is fertile for ideas on rehabilitation, and successfully intertwined themselves with a penal-welfarist emphasis on the needs of the offender. We continue to observe the importation and implementation of Canadian developments in the penal field, with

23 file://id.aau.dk/Users/laursen/Downloads/59612_nytfra_kriminal_0607_WEB.pdf

the latest being the implementation of the Risk-Need-Responsivity (RNR) tool²⁴ (Andrews & Bonta 2003) throughout the Danish Prison and Probation Service.^25,26 This tool connects interventions to the ‘risks’ and ‘needs’ of offenders, and thus is used to ‘match strategies to the learning styles and motivations of cases’ (Andrews, Bonta & Wormith 2006:7). The tool thus promises to assist with the categorization of offenders into risk categories, with the purpose of identifying those individuals most likely to benefit from rehabilitative interventions (Robinson 2008:434). Here, the Danish Prison and Probation Service is perhaps aligning itself with the Anglophone trends of distinguishing between ‘criminogenic’ and ‘non-criminogenic’ needs²⁷ of offenders or ‘cases’ as they are rather mechanistically termed.

After the restructuring of the Danish Prison and Probation Service in 2015, the cognitive behavioural programmes are now administered through the Department for Resocialisation. Currently, six different programmes are offered across the Prison and Probation Service, which are: Cognitive Skills [det Kognitive Færdighedsprogram], Booster (a short follow-up programme to Cognitive Skills), Anger Management, New Roads [Nye Veje], Violence Prevention

24 The Danish Prison and Probation Service uses the term LS/RNR (Level of Service/Risk-Need-Responsivity), but I have chosen to refer to RNR (or the RNR model) in this dissertation as this seems to be the most widespread name for essentially the same phenomenon.

25 A supplement or addition to the cognitive behavioural programmes and the RNR tool is being developed by the Danish Prison Service’s Department for Resocialisation. The new programme is called MOVE (My life, my goals) and is a short cognitive behavioural programme intended for all newly inducted prisoners (personal communication with the Directorate of the Danish Prison Service 2015). This new generic programme mirrors efforts in other penal fields, where generic ‘life skills’ programmes (covering topics like parenting skills, controlling anger, personal hygiene, attitudes towards domestic violence, labour skills, integration into the community, etc.) have been or are intended to be implemented (Porporino, Fabiano & Robinson 1991:248, 249).

26 An evaluation of the RNR tool is currently being carried out in a collaboration between the Danish Prison and Probation Service and the Danish Institute for Local and Regional Government Research (KORA). This evaluation aims to investigate whether the RNR tool leads to lower recidivism, better management of prisoner intake, and better collaboration between different parts of the Danish Prison and Probation Service and the municipalities.

27 This increased classification and categorization might be useful and beneficial for prisoners if it does indeed lead to better courses, training or education. However, Michael Ignatieff (1984:11) shows the potential risks of ‘knowing’ the needs of strangers: ‘there are few presumptions in human relations more dangerous than the idea that one knows what another human being needs better than they do themselves’.

[Voldsforebyggelse], and, lastly, Strengthen and Win [Styrk og Vind]

(http://www.kriminalforsorgen.dk/Kognitive-programmer-5148.aspx). In 2013,²⁸ 657 prisoners and probationers participated in the six different cognitive behavioural programmes offered by the Danish Prison and Probation Service, and 514 completed their programmes (DfK 2013:6). The completion rate is thus 78 per cent. Participants are said to drop out from the programmes as a result of several factors such as being transferred to other prisons, being released during a programme, and personal circumstances such as illness or a lack of motivation (DfK 2013:7). Since approximately 4,000 people were in prison and 8,000 were on probation/under surveillance in 2013, this may not seem to be a high number, but most sentences are too short for prisoners to engage in training programmes, so the coverage is actually quite high.²⁹

The cognitive behavioural programmes Cognitive Skills and Anger Management follow a similar structure (Scheel & Sjöberg 2005; Sjöberg & Windfeldt 2008):

1) Check-in

2) Summary of the previous lesson 3) Agenda for the day

4) Current lesson 5) Homework 6) Round-off 7) Closing 8) Evaluation

This structure is meant to create coherence and ensure programme integrity.

Another similarity between the programmes is the optimal group sizes; there must be no fewer than four and no more than eight participants per group. However, Anger Management should ideally have between four and six participants rather than the eight for Cognitive Skills. These numbers are seen as optimal in relation to group dynamics and discussions, even though it is possible to go through an individual Anger Management programme if the instructor finds that the participant

28 As a result of the restructuring of the Danish Prison and Probation Service and the consequential reallocation of resources, there have been no recent annual statistical reports in regards to the cognitive behavioural programmes. However, it seems plausible to assume that the number of participants has gone up as a result of the training of new cognitive behavioural instructors and thus an intensification of this particular intervention (personal communication with programme consultant Ninnett Haubjerg Madsen of the Department for Resocialisation March 2016).

29 By comparison, 1,689 prisoners went through some sort of cognitive behavioural programme in Norway in 2007, where there are 12,000 new admissions every year, which is a similar proportion to the Danish statistics (Ugelvik 2014).

is unable to participate in a group (DfK 2001 & DfK 2012). Both programmes put a strong emphasis on role play, thinking exercises, quizzes and displays of video sequences as ideal methods for learning social skills. However, there are differences between the two programmes in terms of both length and content, which are described in the following.