About the Program
Aggression Replacement Training® (ART®) is a multimodal psycho-educational intervention designed to alter the behavior of chronically aggressive adolescents and young children. The goal of ART® is to improve social skill competence, anger control, and moral reasoning. The program incorporates three specific interventions: skill-streaming, anger-control training, and training in moral reasoning. Skill-streaming uses modeling, role-playing, performance feedback, and transfer training to teach pro-social skills. In anger-control training, participating youths must bring to each session one or more descriptions of recent anger-arousing experiences (hassles). Over the duration of the program youths are trained in how to respond to their hassles. Training in moral reasoning is designed to enhance youths’ sense of fairness and justice regarding the needs and rights of others and to train youths to imagine the perspectives of others when they confront various moral problem situations.

Aggression Replacement Training® (ART®) began in FACE-IT on April 20, 2009 with twelve residents.  The program consists of a 15-week, 30-hour intervention administered to groups of 8 to 12 juvenile offenders twice weekly. The 15-week sequence is the “core” curriculum, although the ART® curriculum has been offered in a variety of lengths to meet individual and group needs.