Purpose Driven
Rick Warren’s Christian devotional book, The Purpose Driven Life (2002), has sold over 30 million copies. That is five million more copies than The Great Gatsby (1925) sold. It topped the New York Times bestseller list for an historical length of time. It is the second most translated book in the world, after The Holy Bible. The wild success of this book demonstrates the conclusion from our last post: People crave purpose. Fortunately, community corrections provides purpose aplenty; providing second chances, protecting potential victims, returning parents to their children, allowing offenders to take some financial responsibility for their rehabilitation. 
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions” is a frequent paraphrase of statement written by Saint Bernard of Clairvaus around 1150. While the phrase is taken to mean different things to different people, I find its meaning on consistent display in the human service field, including modern day community corrections. It is often the most passionate among us, the ones who want to save the world and believe they can, that create critically dysfunctional human service agencies. While human service agencies do not have a monopoly on dysfunction, they are uniquely prone to it. With passion and purpose to burn, they take off running. Without the structure and guidance of steady principles they often get lost.
Controlling that Fire
I speak from personal experience, really personal. (I love working with offenders. As someone who always seems to be living five years in the future, there is just something attractive about their “live in the moment” worldview. I learn a great deal from them. Hopefully them from me too, but I cannot guarantee that.) I came into the mental health and correctional fields with a belief somewhat equivalent to “love conquers all.” Naïve for sure but also lacking any sort of delivery system. I still have tremendous passion for helping offenders, but when I see unbridled passion, I see more danger than hope. When passion ignores reality, turns its nose up at research, and judges pragmatism, few people are helped. Purpose is like fire. Principles are the safe boundaries. Without the principles, fire does more harm than good.
Few people (consciously) crave structure but most function better with it. People need structure. While we believe we want complete freedom, without boundaries or expectations we often end up frustrated and depressed. Principles serve as guard rails. While they restrict our freedom, they also keep us on track. Stephen R. Covey’s Principle-Centered Leadership has been a centerpiece for many corporate trainers in the past two and a half decades. Explaining how to align your business practices with vital principles, it clearly met a need for CEOs and other leaders worldwide who had discovered their undeniable purpose but needed more guidance for the actual execution. (Apparently people crave young British wizards even more than Purpose or Principles. The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling has sold over half a billion copies worldwide in less than twenty years.)
Principle-Centered
So what principles should practices be built upon? Shouldn’t that be up to the individual community corrections program? For an industry that has never been short on strong beliefs, our industry is in need of guard rails more now than ever. If our industry is to survive and thrive, it is no longer acceptable to proceed on faith and gut. 
We must build practices on top of principles that have been well researched and proven, not just worshiped. Without using evidence based principles (EBP), we are essentially proceeding with a “long conquers all” mission statement. As you can see from our Evidence Based Principles (EBP): Simplified white paper, the principles are congruent with common sense and not foreign or complex. So...let’s let the fire of passion and purpose burn, but let’s be principle centered too. Let’s learn from our successes and failures and, most importantly, from a growing body of research about what principles contain that fire, thus making it productive rather than out of control.
Read more in the series of The 5Ps of Community Corrections
- Community Corrections: Leading with Purpose
- Principle Centered Community Corrections
- Turning Evidence Based Principles (EBP) into Policies
- The 5Ps of Community Corrections: Procedures
- The 5Ps of Community Corrections: Practices
