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.

If your fairy godmother appeared today, what’s the one part of your workday you would ask her to wave her wand at?

Maybe it’s a task at work that you want to avoid at all costs.

Maybe it’s something that you know you need to do but can’t seem to find the time.

For me, it was facing the disheartening and down right frightening task of filing those darn manila folders.

Living in Harry Potter’s Cupboard

Before CorrectTech came on the scene, I was a Case Manager Supervisor and Program Coordinator at Time to Change Community Corrections (TTC) with an office that served partially as a file room.

The stacks of manila folders (with “to be filed” discharged client files, staff meeting notes, fire drill reports, etc., etc.) would stare me down daily, giving me a constant reminder of the terror that came with tracking and storing them. I think the nightmares and cold sweats have finally stopped.

Discharge Wasn’t the End… It Was the Beginning of the Filing Crusade

In community corrections, we are required to store client information following discharge. At TTC, we had to store our paper client files for SEVEN years. For us that meant seven years of historic files occupying real estate in our already overcrowded filing room plus the accumulation of new files.

Did your New Year’s Resolutions make it 50 days into 2016? 

Maybe you vowed to stop eating carbs (let’s be real… giving up bread and pasta is WAY harder than it sounds).

Maybe you resolved to balance your work / home time or to save more money.

Maybe you did what our CEO and Chief Problem Solver, Eric Tumperi did and made a new year’s resolution to commit to fitness. However, we don’t all make it 365 (or 366) days sticking to our resolutions. A recent study performed by the University of Scranton showed that more than a third of people that make new year’s resolutions give up in the first month. Sometimes it is of our own resolve; we don’t take it seriously or fully commit. Sometimes it is out of our control.

Data Matters in Community Corrections! 

The second decade of this young millennium is proving to be a major turning point for community corrections agencies and practitioners.

Software is changing the way we practice community corrections and we are making progress daily in our efforts to make our data systems more functional, practically and clinically. (See Is Software the Key to EBP –Part I to see how.)

Practically, it is now possible to have a fully paperless and EBP-influenced information system that has the ability to integrate facility security functions with overall case management, treatment, programming, accountability, supervision, and outcome measures.

Clinically, treatment providers and researchers are working together in unique ways to actually implement EBP rather than just talk about it.

Technologically, advances in software performance and flexibility have resulted in the ability to quickly integrate new practical and clinical innovations into community corrections information systems.

The EBP and “what works” movements were born out of data at a time when few community corrections programs had sophisticated information systems. The research data gathering was painstaking and resulted in limited visibility. For EBP to fulfill its promise to impact the lives of both the practitioner and the client, it is time for integrated and intelligent systems to provide the next generation of “EBP Data” that comes to us daily, weekly and monthly from our own IT systems.