It’s summer time! 

We are less than six weeks in to the Game of Thrones waiting game and counting down the days until (or fondly remembering) our summer vacations.

To help get out of the summer office space slump, we pulled together a few easy tips on staying productive in your community corrections office.

We know it can be difficult to stay focused on your clients and their treatment (much less all of the paperwork that comes along with them) when you’d rather be at the pool.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t make the most of the time you have this summer with your clients.

1. Get active! Take your sessions outside your office. Why keep everyone cooped up inside when you can take your sessions and programs outside? Take a walk around the office or use the stairs instead of the elevator. Here are some other ideas for moving around the office from the American Heart Association. 

2. Help your clients plan something they can look forward to. 

1. Ohio is working hard to decrease the prison population through more effective community and re-entry methods.

2. Losing a mother to crack, being on your own after numerous foster home and group home placements, and pleading guilty to and serving time on a felony you didn’t commit didn’t hold Rayshawn Wilson back from being successful and inspiring. His battle is fierce and he sites “purpose” as the secret ingredient to driving motivation and how this and attitude, thoughts and belief and believing in something greater than themselves are key factors he has noted in those who bring desistance from crime for many who don’t go back to crime (like himself).
Check out Rayshawn Wilson’s new book, LionHeart: Coming From Where I’m From.

3. We met community corrections workers that need an automated system that will create their reports and documents for them, scores their assessments for them, write up incidents for them, track dosage and structured time for them… so they can have more time to do their important client work that they are clearly passionate about doing!

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.

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.

Common Interests

I learned a hard lesson about “community.” I attempted to zone a community corrections facility without building a relationship with the community first. Rookie mistake. The public hearing wasn’t pretty. It is said that when under attack, human nature is to fight, flight or freeze. This community felt attacked and fought. Hard. And won. While I felt pretty battered at the time, it might be the most important lesson I’ve learned as a professional. I realized that until you understand , really understand, what “community” means, you might want to consider a career other than community corrections.