Bringing Down the Hammer 

The primary job responsibility of security staff in community corrections focuses on maintaining safety both inside facilities and in the community.

As a former Correctional Technician in a community corrections program, I understand the importance of having a strong security staff in your program. Fortunately I worked in a program that believed in more than just catching clients being bad. But sometimes I had to be the bad guy; it wasn’t easy. Making a decision that could send a client back to prison is difficult. You want them to succeed but community safety is a top priority.

Inside facilities, security staff’s responsibilities historically include completing house counts, maintaining a clean facility, monitoring for contraband and completing client drug and alcohol monitors. They hold clients accountable for daily tasks by producing incident reports and inspecting daily chores and other tasks.

While clients are in the community, the security staff is responsible for completing community whereabouts calls with potential employers, supervisors, and clients themselves. They are also responsible for tracking clients and ensuring they arrive and leave locations at designated times.

In short, security staff has been a rule enforcer.

The Shift in Thinking

As thinking and training have evolved in community corrections, so have the job responsibilities of security staff.

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Good Enough or.... Excellent

What makes a poor customer service experience stand out? It is easy to think of that inattentive waiter, being forced to listen to terrible hold music for an hour, or even a cashier that was rude for no reason at all. But what about all of the times you experienced excellent customer service? What made the experience go from good to great? Was it an employee going out of their way to accommodate you? Maybe someone following up with you multiple times? Or was it as simple as someone that seemed to genuinely care if you had everything you needed.

These scenarios all have something in common: they involved someone making you, the customer, a priority. As often as we experience customer service during our daily lives at restaurants, banks and grocery stores, it is easy to forget how often we provide customer service in other areas of our life. When you think of the last few times you provided customer service was it excellent, pretty good, or just good enough? Did you go the extra mile or even the extra foot? Did you leave your customer feeling as though you truly cared and they were a priority or did you go through the motions? Providing excellent customer service when working with offenders can be especially difficult. The drudgery of paperwork and many compliance tasks along with the sheer volume of clients most criminal justice employees interact with daily can be a recipe for “poor” customer service experiences.