A Longitudinal Examination of Stepping Up, Stepping Out With Incarcerated Men in Restrictive Housing: An Expansion of the 2021 Pilot

The use of restrictive housing as a correctional practice remains a contentious issue and one that has been an increasing target for reform efforts. While some departments are seeing success in implementing large-scale changes, others are held back by limited resources. Stepping up, stepping out (SUSO) is a cognitive-behavioral program for individuals in long-term restrictive housing units with behavioral and mental health challenges and is designed to fit within various institutional structures. SUSO is intensive and takes approximately 10 weeks to complete. Pilot results published in 2021 supported SUSO as a promising intervention for this high-risk population. We present an updated set of analyses that compared pre- to posttreatment outcomes using a larger sample of men who completed the full program (N = 133), and examined a subset of individuals (N = 46) with 6-month follow-up data. Knowledge acquisition, ratings of working alliance, and whether client and/or pretreatment factors predicted program completion were also analyzed. With the larger sample, reductions in emotional distress, procriminal attitudes, and general and reactive criminal thinking were observed from pre- to postintervention. Among the subsample with 6-month data, the largest and most consistent changes were from baseline to follow-up. Although changes in proactive criminal thinking followed a declining trend over time and across analyses, they did not reach statistical significance, suggesting a different or modified mechanism of change for this style. Limitations are discussed along with recommendations for continued program evaluation.