The following text provides a description of the GLM key theoretical components and conceptual underpinnings. For a detailed understanding of the model, please consult published references or contact the relevant person from the profiles page.
The GLM is a strength-based rehabilitation framework that is responsive to offenders’ particular interests, abilities, and aspirations. It also directs practitioners to explicitly construct intervention plans that help offenders acquire the capabilities to achieve things and outcomes that are personally meaningful to them. It assumes that all individuals have similar aspirations and needs and that one of the primary responsibilities of parents, teachers, and the broader community is to help each of us acquire the tools required to make our own way in the world. Criminal behaviour results when individuals lack the internal and external resources necessary to satisfy their values using pro-social means. In other words, criminal behaviour represents a maladaptive attempt to meet life values (Ward and Stewart, 2003). Rehabilitation endeavours should therefore equip offenders with the knowledge, skills, opportunities, and resources necessary to satisfy their life values in ways that don’t harm others. Inherent in its focus on an offender’s life values, the GLM places a strong emphasis on offender agency. That is, offenders, like the rest of us, actively seek to satisfy their life values through whatever means available to them. The GLM’s dual attention to an offender’s internal values and life priorities and external factors such as resources and opportunities give it practical utility in desistance-oriented interventions.
The GLM is a theory of offender rehabilitation that contains three hierarchical sets of conceptual underpinnings: general ideas concerning the aims of rehabilitation, aetiological underpinnings that account for the onset and maintenance of offending, and practical implications arising from the rehabilitation aims and aetiological positioning.
