Good Lives Model (GLM)
Definition
Tony Ward's strengths-based treatment framework, holding that offending reflects maladaptive pursuit of universal human goods. Effective treatment builds prosocial routes to those goods alongside risk-management skill-building.
- Developer
- Tony Ward
- Category
- Strengths-based offender treatment framework
- Core premise
- Offending reflects maladaptive pursuit of universal human goods
- Paired approach
- Used alongside the Risk-Need-Responsivity model
Common questions
How does GLM differ from the purely risk-focused Risk-Need-Responsivity model?+
RNR focuses on identifying and managing criminogenic risk factors to reduce reoffending, while GLM adds a positive treatment goal, building legitimate, prosocial ways to meet the same underlying human needs that drove the offending, and the two are often combined in practice.
What are examples of the primary human goods GLM identifies?+
Ward's framework lists goods such as relatedness, autonomy, mastery, health and creativity; treatment under GLM works to help offenders pursue these through legal and prosocial means rather than through offending behaviour.
Has GLM shown better outcomes than risk-only approaches in sex-offender treatment?+
Evidence is mixed and evolving, some studies report improved treatment engagement and completion rates under combined GLM-RNR programmes, but solid long-term reoffending comparisons isolating GLM's added effect remain limited.
Related terms
- ATSA
- Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (US); their 2014 practice standards set the international benchmark for assessment, treatment programme design, and...
- Criminogenic Need
- A dynamic risk factor that is causally linked to reoffending and that changes in response to intervention. Distinguished from non-criminogenic needs that...
- Moral Reconation Therapy (MRT)
- Greg Little and Kenneth Robinson's manualized group programme targeting moral reasoning development through structured workbook exercises. Widely used in US corrections; evidence...
- Risk-Need-Responsivity (RNR)
- Andrews and Bonta's three-principle framework for corrections: match treatment intensity to risk level, target criminogenic needs, deliver in a responsive way. The...
- SOTP
- UK Sex Offender Treatment Programme, the largest structured sex-offender treatment system in England and Wales, withdrawn in 2017 after a Ministry of...
- Static-99R
- A 10-item actuarial sex-offender risk instrument; the -R denotes the age-at-release weighting adjustment. Scores map to relative-risk labels (Below Average through Well...
- SVP Civil Commitment
- A US legal mechanism (following Kansas v. Hendricks, 1997) that allows indefinite civil detention of convicted sex offenders assessed as likely to...