The EQUIP Program Revised and Expanded

This newly revised and expanded edition of the EQUIP program features a comprehensive cognitive behavioral approach for helping aggressive, high-risk youth.

The EQUIP program, with its motivating–equipping rationale, has a historical background spanning decades. This newly expanded and revised edition of the EQUIP program—The EQUIP Program for High-Risk Adolescents: Serving Residential and Community Agencies—features a comprehensive cognitive behavioral approach for helping aggressive, high-risk youth. EQUIP starts, in residential and even community agencies, by turning around negative peer influences—the high-risk youth’s negative (e.g., irresponsible, destructive) immediate culture.

EQUIP is a comprehensive program: It utilizes both motivating (peer-helping) and equipping (cognitive behavioral) approaches. This book now contains the complete EQUIP Implementation Guide.

Key Features:

The basic idea and core program of EQUIP—motivating and equipping aggressive youths to think and act responsibly—has not changed. Yet, some important innovations have emerged and are included in this new edition. We note four main expansions, responsive to trends since 1995:

• community agencies: You will see greater attention to the implementation of EQUIP in nonresidential community or outpatient agencies.
• life issues: We have expanded our self-report tools and treatment focus to include youths’ current life issues, such as gun violence and domestic violence.
• self-debasing cognitive distortions: This expansion addresses the increasing hopelessness and self-debasing thinking among today’s youthful offenders—both male and female.
• social media: Youths’ increase in the use of online social media warrants inclusion of Managing Social Media among the new current life issues in this new edition

Since its introduction in the early 1990s, the EQUIP Program has been adapted and implemented at various facilities and institutions in North America, Europe, and Australia. The institutions include juvenile correctional facilities, community-based adult correctional facilities, halfway houses, re-entry programs, and middle grades through high schools. Individuals served have ranged in age from preadolescence through adulthood.