Preparing the books to read every day is enjoyable for many people. However, there are still many people who also don't like reading. This is a problem. But, when you can support others to start reading, it will be better. One of the books that can be recommended for new readers is experience and education. This book is not kind of difficult book to read. It can be read and understand by the new readers.

Experience and Education.

Can hardened criminals really reform? "Making Good" provides resounding proof that the answer is yes. This book provides a fascinating narrative analysis of the lives of repeat offenders who, by all statistical measures, should have continued on the criminal path but instead have created lives of productivity and purpose. This examination of the phenomenology of "making good" includes an encyclopedic review of the literature on personal reform as well as a practical guide to the use of narratives in offender counseling and rehabilitation.The author's research shows that criminals who desist from crime have constructed powerful narratives that aided them in making sense of their pasts, finding fulfillment in productive behaviors, and feeling in control of their future. Borrowing from the field of narrative psychology, Maruna argues that to truly understand offenders, we must understand the stories that they tell - and that in turn this story-making process has the capacity to transform lives. "Making Good" challenges some of the cherished assumptions of various therapy models for offenders and supports new paradigms for offender rehabilitation. This groundbreaking book is a must read for criminologists, forensic psychologists, lawyers, rehabilitation counselors, or anyone interested in the generative process of change.

Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives

Psychologists have worried about the distortions introduced into standardized personality measures by social desirability bias. Survey researchers have had similar concerns about the accuracy of survey reports about such topics as illicit drug use, abortion, and sexual behavior. The article reviews the research done by survey methodologists on reporting errors in surveys on sensitive topics, noting parallels and differences from the psychological literature on social desirability. The findings from the survey studies suggest that misreporting about sensitive topics is quite common and that it is largely situational. The extent of misreporting depends on whether the respondent has anything embarrassing to report and on design features of the survey. The survey evidence also indicates that misreporting on sensitive topics is a more or less motivated process in which respondents edit the information they report to avoid embarrassing themselves in the presence of an interviewer or to avoid repercussions from third parties.

https://www.learnlab.org/research/wiki/images/a/a8/Tourangeau_SensitiveQuestions.pdf

Sensitive questions in surveys.

Scientific advances over the past 20 years have shown that drug addiction is a chronic, relapsing disease that results from the prolonged effects of drugs on the brain. As with many other brain diseases, addiction has embedded behavioral and social-context aspects that are important parts of the disorder itself. Therefore, the most effective treatment approaches will include biological, behavioral, and social-context components. Recognizing addiction as a chronic, relapsing brain disorder characterized by compulsive drug seeking and use can impact society's overall health and social policy strategies and help diminish the health and social costs associated with drug abuse and addiction.

/pdf/addiction-is-a-brain-disease-and-it-matters-4z8hk6xh55.pdf

Addiction is a brain disease, and it matters.

Crime, smoking, drug use, alcoholism, reckless driving, and many other unhealthy patterns of behavior that play out over a lifetime often debut during adolescence. Avoiding risks or buying time can set a different lifetime pattern. Changing unhealthy behaviors in adolescence would have a broad impact on society, reducing the burdens of disease, injury, human suffering, and associated economic costs. Any program designed to prevent or change such risky behaviors should be founded on a clear idea of what is normative (what behaviors, ideally, should the program foster?), descriptive (how are adolescents making decisions in the absence of the program?), and prescriptive (which practices can realistically move adolescent decisions closer to the normative ideal?). Normatively, decision processes should be evaluated for coherence (is the thinking process nonsensical, illogical, or self-contradictory?) and correspondence (are the outcomes of the decisions positive?). Behaviors that promote positive physical and mental health outcomes in modern society can be at odds with those selected for by evolution (e.g., early procreation). Healthy behaviors may also conflict with a decision maker's goals. Adolescents' goals are more likely to maximize immediate pleasure, and strict decision analysis implies that many kinds of unhealthy behavior, such as drinking and drug use, could be deemed rational. However, based on data showing developmental changes in goals, it is important for policy to promote positive long-term outcomes rather than adolescents' short-term goals. Developmental data also suggest that greater risk aversion is generally adaptive, and that decision processes that support this aversion are more advanced than those that support risk taking. A key question is whether adolescents are developmentally competent to make decisions about risks. In principle, barring temptations with high rewards and individual differences that reduce self-control (i.e., under ideal conditions), adolescents are capable of rational decision making to achieve their goals. In practice, much depends on the particular situation in which a decision is made. In the heat of passion, in the presence of peers, on the spur of the moment, in unfamiliar situations, when trading off risks and benefits favors bad long-term outcomes, and when behavioral inhibition is required for good outcomes, adolescents are likely to reason more poorly than adults do. Brain maturation in adolescence is incomplete. Impulsivity, sensation seeking, thrill seeking, depression, and other individual differences also contribute to risk taking that resists standard risk-reduction interventions, although some conditions such as depression can be effectively treated with other approaches. Major explanatory models of risky decision making can be roughly divided into (a) those, including health-belief models and the theory of planned behavior, that adhere to a "rational" behavioral decision-making framework that stresses deliberate, quantitative trading off of risks and benefits; and (b) those that emphasize nondeliberative reaction to the perceived gists or prototypes in the immediate decision environment. (A gist is a fuzzy mental representation of the general meaning of information or experience; a prototype is a mental representation of a standard or typical example of a category.) Although perceived risks and especially benefits predict behavioral intentions and risk-taking behavior, behavioral willingness is an even better predictor of susceptibility to risk taking-and has unique explanatory power-because adolescents are willing to do riskier things than they either intend or expect to do. Dual-process models, such as the prototype/willingness model and fuzzy-trace theory, identify two divergent paths to risk taking: a reasoned and a reactive route. Such models explain apparent contradictions in the literature, including different causes of risk taking for different individuals. Interventions to reduce risk taking must take into account the different causes of such behavior if they are to be effective. Longitudinal and experimental research are needed to disentangle opposing causal processes-particularly, those that produce positive versus negative relations between risk perceptions and behaviors. Counterintuitive findings that must be accommodated by any adequate theory of risk taking include the following: (a) Despite conventional wisdom, adolescents do not perceive themselves to be invulnerable, and perceived vulnerability declines with increasing age; (b) although the object of many interventions is to enhance the accuracy of risk perceptions, adolescents typically overestimate important risks, such as HIV and lung cancer; (c) despite increasing competence in reasoning, some biases in judgment and decision making grow with age, producing more "irrational" violations of coherence among adults than among adolescents and younger children. The latter occurs because of a known developmental increase in gist processing with age. One implication of these findings is that traditional interventions stressing accurate risk perceptions are apt to be ineffective or backfire because young people already feel vulnerable and overestimate their risk. In addition, research shows that experience is not a good teacher for children and younger adolescents, because they tend to learn little from negative outcomes (favoring the use of effective deterrents, such as monitoring and supervision), although learning from experience improves considerably with age. Experience in the absence of negative consequences may increase feelings of invulnerability and thus explain the decrease in risk perceptions from early to late adolescence, as exploration increases. Finally, novel interventions that discourage deliberate weighing of risks and benefits by adolescents may ultimately prove more effective and enduring. Mature adults apparently resist taking risks not out of any conscious deliberation or choice, but because they intuitively grasp the gists of risky situations, retrieve appropriate risk-avoidant values, and never proceed down the slippery slope of actually contemplating tradeoffs between risks and benefits.

/pdf/risk-and-rationality-in-adolescent-decision-making-3j8wuxlfve.pdf

Risk and Rationality in Adolescent Decision Making: Implications for Theory, Practice, and Public Policy

A multistage therapeutic community treatment system has been instituted in the Delaware correctional system, and its effectiveness has captured the attention of the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Justice, members of Congress, and the White House. Treatment occurs in a three-stage system, with each phase corresponding to the client's changing correctional status—incarceration, work release, and parole. In this paper, 18 month follow-up data are analyzed for those who received treatment in: (1) a prison-based therapeutic community only, (2) a work release therapeutic community followed by aftercare, and (3) the prison-based therapeutic community followed by the work release therapeutic community and aftercare. These groups are compared with a no-treatment group. Those receiving treatment in the two-stage (work release and aftercare) and three-stage (prison, work release, and aftercare) models had significantly lower rates of drug relapse and criminal recidivism, even when adjusted for othe...

An Effective Model of Prison-Based Treatment for Drug-Involved Offenders:

http://www.rashkind.com/alternatives/dir_02/Drug%20Treatment%20for%20Adult%20Offenders%20The%20State%20of%20the%20State-Taxman%20etal.pdf

Drug treatment services for adult offenders: The state of the state

Surveys of drug use are continually criticized on the premise that respondents underreport the extent of their drug use. Validation studies conducted prior to the mid-1980s involving known samples of drug users or urinalysis techniques showed that drug use was fairly accurately reported in self-report surveys. However, more recent validation studies conducted with criminal justice clients using improved urinalysis techniques suggest less concordance between urinalysis and self-report. This paper reviews these studies and their implications for the validity of self-report in epidemiological drug surveys. Some general conclusions can be drawn from various validation studies. Valid self-reporting of drug use is a function of: 1) the recency of the event, 2) the social desirability of the drug, and 3) nuances of data collection methodology. The paper discusses methods used to improve the validity and quality of self-report data on drug use.

The Validity of Self-Reported Data on Drug Use

In a state-of-the-art presentation, Heroin in the Age of Crack-Cocaine presents articles by experts in the field on current developments and emerging trends in addition to a historical overview of heroin use in this country. Filling a void in the literature on what's known about the "new" heroin users, this volume also updates the readers on the status of aging heroin addicted populations who initiated use of the drug prior to the "age of cocaine." Having moved from the stereotypical "shooting galleries" of back alleys in inner city neighborhoods, heroin addiction continues to rise in mainstream culture and new ways of administration have come into use. A relative abundance of purer Southeast Asian heroin, the rapid rise in popularity of crack-cocaine, treatment controversies, and the realized role that injection drug use plays in the transmission of HIV all suggest increased dimensions of the heroin problem and in their saliency for the 1990s and beyond. 
 
Academics, researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and students will find Heroin in the Age of Crack-Cocaine to be a comprehensive and significant contribution to existing research, as well as a stimulant to further discussion and study of this rapidly evolving issue and its impact in the health and criminal justice arenas of our society.

Heroin in the Age of Crack Cocaine

In a state-of-the-art presentation, Heroin in the Age of Crack-Cocaine presents articles by experts in the field on current developments and emerging trends in addition to a historical overview of heroin use in this country. Filling a void in the literature on what's known about the "new" heroin users, this volume also updates the readers on the status of aging heroin addicted populations who initiated use of the drug prior to the "age of cocaine." Having moved from the stereotypical "shooting galleries" of back alleys in inner city neighborhoods, heroin addiction continues to rise in mainstream culture and new ways of administration have come into use. A relative abundance of purer Southeast Asian heroin, the rapid rise in popularity of crack-cocaine, treatment controversies, and the realized role that injection drug use plays in the transmission of HIV all suggest increased dimensions of the heroin problem and in their saliency for the 1990s and beyond. 

Academics, researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and students will find Heroin in the Age of Crack-Cocaine to be a comprehensive and significant contribution to existing research, as well as a stimulant to further discussion and study of this rapidly evolving issue and its impact in the health and criminal justice arenas of our society.

Lana D. Harrison

Papers

An Effective Model of Prison-Based Treatment for Drug-Involved Offenders:

Drug treatment services for adult offenders: The state of the state

The Validity of Self-Reported Data on Drug Use

Heroin in the Age of Crack Cocaine

Heroin in the age of crack cocaine.