Some participants describe how Victoria's terrorism rehabilitation program changed their thinking

The outcomes in this study are reported as words. "Some" participants stopped offending and went on to build skills and strengths to lead lives in line with their own values and interests, the authors write ^[5]. "Several" genuinely changed their beliefs, through more knowledge, more contextual interpretation, more guidance, more care and respect, and more time ^[8]. Twenty-four people sat for the interviews. Twenty had terrorism-related convictions, so four in the sample did not ^[3][16].

There is no comparison group here and no reoffending figure ^[17]. For a caseload of this kind that is a defensible design, and the interviews do show the order in which things happened, and what the people who changed credit for it. The credit in this account goes to time, to trusted relationships with mentors, and to unexpected acts of kindness from people the participants had once viewed as the enemy ^[7].

The religious mentors supplied deeper knowledge, and the reappraisal was the participants' own work ^[9]. One participant told the researchers that the CISP taught them to pay attention to context and to see that things are not black and white, and that it taught them humility; they had been very judgmental before, and being humbled was a difficult experience for them ^[10].

A checklist asking whether an offender has renounced an ideology would capture little of that. The authors write that reappraising ideology helped participants move away from terrorism ^[6], and that ideology plays a role in most journeys into terrorism without explaining behaviour on its own, usually working alongside relationships and the way a person's social identity forms ^[12]. Belief change and strengths-building both sit in the account. Which of the two predicts staying out is left open, because no outcome rate is reported for either ^[17].

The staffing is the detail an administrator will notice. Support for one participant can involve a community imam, a case manager, a clinical psychologist, an officer who handles the move from prison back into the community, and a family support officer ^[2]. The researchers call the program Australia's longest-running of its kind ^[4]. It has run since 2010, long enough to have a reoffending count for its graduates, and this write-up does not give one ^[1][17].