The high incidence of violence, especially among youth, in American society is of great concern to citizens, lawmakers and law-enforcement agencies (Colander & Elgin, 2001). The costs of the problems are staggering. In this regard, Rapp-Paglicci and Roberts (2002) state that these include: costs to government to operate its criminal justice system (e.g., police, prosecution, courts, probation, incarceration, parole); medical costs to the individual; the loss of productivity to society due death, medical and mental disabilities resulting from violence; loss of work time by victims and their families; loss of property values in neighborhoods with high rates of crime; pain and suffering of crime victims, their families, friends and often even the community; and loss of productive citizens such as when offenders are not rehabilitated and so continue to commit crimes.
In an effort to deal with the problem of violence, many programs have focused on helping violent young people. One such program is Aggression Replacement Training or ART. This paper provides a brief overview of ART, describing its theoretical framework, its basic goals and objectives, and its essential procedures.
Goldstein, Glick and Gibbs (1998) state that Aggression Replacement Training is based on cognitive behavioral theory which holds that aggressive behavior, like all behavior, is learned. The basic theory conceptualizes violence as a systems problem in which the system is characterized in tripartite fashion consisting of teacher, school, and family, all of whom employ methods learning methods (e.g., modeling, reinforcement strategies) that either facilitate aggression or reduce it. Thus, the authors state, what is needed is a multimodal cognitive/learning-based intervention aimed at altering the behavior of aggressive youth, reducing their anti-social behavior and offering them training in alternative prosocia
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