Correctional Counseling, 1st edition

For courses in Correctional Counseling, Correctional Treatment, Rehabilitation, and Corrections.

Written by practitioners in the field, Correctional Counseling offers a strong practitioner orientation, enabling students to become proficient in providing basic correctional counseling services to the offender population. The desire to provide a teaching-and-learning aid that will create practitioners in the field who are competent in offender treatment is the overarching goal of this text. Students are provided basic information on underlying theoretical perspectives among a variety of counseling approaches, and the text addresses the details of the counseling and treatment process itself, explaining exactly how correctional counseling is done in the field.

Pedagogical features frame the concepts covered in the chapter and help make learning easier for students:

• Chapter Objectives make the purpose and emphasis of the chapter clear to the student and instructor.
• Section Summaries within each of the chapters provide an organized, structured presentation of the information and remind students of the main points to the content that they have previously read.
• Learning Checks within the section summaries support the information presented throughout the section and reinforce chapter learning objectives.
• Chapter Conclusions followed by Essay Questions foster students to further think about key topics in the chapter. 

Case Vignettes provide examples of how counseling techniques might be utilized:

• The use of these vignettes creates both a strong counseling orientation as well as a criminal justice orientation to this text.
• The use of teaching-and-learning aids that are familiar to most persons involved in the counseling field ensures that this text meets the needs and expectations of persons who seriously intend to work in the field of offender treatment.    

A treatment planning exercise is included at the end of most chapters:

• These application-oriented exercises encourage students to apply the techniques that they have learned in each successive chapter of the text.
• In many cases, students are required to use specific techniques that they have learned in chapters that cover counseling techniques and/or approaches.  

Offers a strong emphasis on assessment, classification, and evaluation:

• Addresses a very important aspect of the correctional counseling process, helping students understand how to implement classification processes and assessments for treatment and security purposes typically required or strongly encouraged by most agencies.