Abstract

To develop rehabilitative treatment programs for persons who have committed crimes, correctional psychologists build theoretical structures that weld theoretical ideas about the causes of criminal behavior, theoretical perspectives about appropriate targets for correctional intervention and normative assumptions about crime and the aims of correctional intervention. To differentiate the tri-partite theoretical structure with which correctional program designers' work, Ward and Durrant (2021) introduce the metatheoretical concept of “practice frameworks”. In this paper, I describe and evaluate this concept, situating my analysis within the broader contexts of philosophical work on scientific theories and models and metatheoretical work on the structure of explanatory and intervention theories in correctional psychology.