4 Dec 2021

Prof Tony Ward: helping violent offenders lead better lives

From Saturday Morning, 5:35 pm on 4 December 2021

It's very easy to view people who commit criminal offences as "moral strangers", says Professor Tony Ward, but we all have the same innate human needs.

Good Lives - the rehabilitation model Ward devised - is helping keep people out of prison in many other countries, but his work is only now getting attention in Aotearoa.

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Photo: Victoria University of Wellington.

Tony Ward won the 2021 Te Apārangi Mason Durie Medal for his pioneering research into correctional rehabilitation.

Good Lives is based on the understanding that every human being - no matter what they've done - has the same personal needs for things like connection and creativity, Ward tells Kim Hill.

A story told to him by a Belgian colleague demonstrates how a crime can reflect such a need.

Faced with a man who could not or would not stop stealing bicycles, Ward's colleague took the Good Lives approach and asked what the man was really trying to achieve with this behaviour.

Soon noticing the man stole only broken-down bikes, he eventually discovered that he chose these ones so he could repair them.

This repetitious theft was the man's deeply problematic attempt at meeting his own needs for mastery and creativity, Ward says.

Later, the man was supplied with some fixer-upper bicycles from the dump and eventually he turned his passion into a business.

In the traditional criminal justice model, this man would have been promptly put in jail without anyone inquiring about his personal motivation for the behaviour, Ward says.

We categorise offenders by their type of criminal behaviour yet people who commit similar crimes are pursuing an enormous range of personal goals, he says.

"For some people, violence is about control… sometimes it's about feeling jealous and insecure. Sometimes it's about signalling how a person should behave. Sometimes, in unusual cases, it's pleasurable and there's a sadistic element."

Ward says few people he's met in prison have had psychopathic traits.

"[Convicted criminals] are not people who don't care. They're not people who enjoy inflicting pain, they're not antisocial. They've gone about living their lives in ways that are unethical and problematic."

When he was director of Kia Marama - a treatment programme for child sex offenders - the standard approach to treatment involved analysing a person's risk factors and triggers for impulsivity, and with that information developing a relapse-prevention plan for them, Ward says.

The problem with this approach, which is still the dominant approach for correctional treatment around the world, is that it doesn't invite the person to change, he says.

In New Zealand, rehabilitation is only minorly effective at keeping people from returning to jail, he says.

"Based on 2017 figures of people who've been in prison, 60 percent will return within two years.

"[New Zealand] treatment programmes are very coarse-grained, they're based on overly broad categories like violent behaviour and sexual offending and it does not get to the nuances, the individual motivations … and it also doesn't take into account that people are seeking to live the best life they can, a fulfilling life and meaningful life, even if from our point of view it looks like a meaningless life, one bereft of purpose. That's not the way it is for the people on the inside."

In the Good Lives treatment model, people are helped to identify the personal motivations - such as the desire for connection - that have fuelled their criminal behaviour, and find alternative ways to achieve these things they really value.

Why not adopt an approach that takes offenders personal goals seriously and then helps them build skills and create opportunities to achieve them, Ward asks.

"What's the best way to engage people in the process of change? I don't think it's saying to them 'look, I want you to spend nine months essentially talking about your deepest fears, exploring your sexual fantasies, doing all this very difficult work… and at the end of that, I can promise you you're less likely to hurt other people'. It's not much of an invitation to change.

"The Good Lives approach has two key goals that are intertwined - [the first goal is] helping someone obtain a more fulfilling life, a meaningful life. Alongside that is making sure you reduce and manage risk. You have to have both. If you only have one, you've got a very dangerous happy person… you've got a person who's utterly disconnected."

The Good Lives Model is being used in Australia, Canada, the US and Europe, but until recently Ward's work has been "pretty much ignored" in New Zealand.

His guess as to why is the depth of commitment NZ's Department of Corrections has to a "risk-reduction approach" to treatment.

In recent years, though, Ward has been giving workshops to Department of Corrections psychologists.

"Clinicians like [the Good Lives] approach because it's more therapeutic. It treats the person that commits the offence as 'one of us' in the sense that we can understand their behaviour and work with them, rather than [viewing them] as someone we need to quarantine and manage in some way."

To make New Zealand a safer and more equitable place, we must be able to motivate the people who commit crimes to seek personal change, Ward says.

"There's no one reason why people commit crimes. It's complex. Let's get real. Let's take the research seriously."