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.

Who wins games, defense or offense? If it is defense, why does the coach get fired after too many games with too few points? If it is offense, why do players lose their positions if they can’t do their jobs defensively? I can tell you what ESPN talking heads might say… but let’s face it, every member is crucial in the team’s success.

Departments in community corrections also need to be able to operate as a team and share information. I’ve compared our residential community corrections team at Time to Change to a football team in trainings. You have your defense (security), your offense (case managers) and your coaches (management). You need all parts of the team to get to the end goal of successful client reintegration.

The Previously Tedious Incident Report

Take incident reports (IRs) for example. Accountability and structure is a big part of creating change. We all have rules to follow and we do better when we know the consequences, good or bad, of our behavior. Before we had a fully integrated case management software system, our IR tracking system at Time to Change was… just awful.

The Foundational Roles of Technology in Agency EBP Work

For evidence based practices to come alive, we must measure everything… and not using our fingers and toes!

It All Started with Looking For A Better Way…

Ten years ago, there was little reason to focus on the software features needed to design an EBP software system. Early in the EBP movement, agencies’ pursuit of EBP was tied to “validated risk assessments” and new case management disciplines as characterized in Motivational Interviewing.[i] In other words, there was little impact on legacy case management systems. In fact, new automation was centered on the emerging risk assessment tools. 

Today, with rising expectations from funding agencies, courts, and our community stakeholders to show progress in EBP, measure outcomes, and determine what works with our own client populations, the rules have changed. There is fresh impetus and opportunity to reconsider what it means to have a modern-day case management system for the residential and non-residential community corrections field. After all, legislators and community stakeholders have been convinced of the merits of the science and strategy behind investing in offender rehabilitation instead of incarceration. The challenge for the coming decade is to show real results and make meaningful efforts to learn about outcomes, apply new knowledge, and create a system of people, processes and data that brings the promise of EBP to life.