My 15-year-old daughter has her driver’s permit. She is attentive and cautious, but sometimes being in the car with a learning driver is a bit harrowing. She is slowly becoming more comfortable and confident but still needs guidance at times and frequent feedback for assurance. She will have her license soon, but, for now, this learners’ permit experience serves a great transition from being an unlicensed driver who still needs Dad to play taxi driver to a licensed driver who believes she needs nothing from no one.

Learning the necessary skills to earn that freedom is not without stress for driver and passenger, but imagining what the roads would be like without such a transition period is certainly far more frightening.

Transition Clients Back into the Community

Thoughtful planning, basic skills training and the freedom to make some mistakes are vital aspects of a good transition for community corrections offenders too. In fact, it can be argued that the lack of such a process is largely to blame for our unacceptably high recidivism rate.

As the father of two teenage girls, any article about parenting tends to catch my attention. I found this article Parenting Style and Its Correlates by Nancy Darling particularly interesting both as a parent and as an administrator for a community corrections facility. While there is not much new information in this article about which parenting style typically results in well-adjusted children, it is a great summary. What was new for me in reading this article is the parallel that I see in working with offenders.

A Couple Key Definitions

Parenting: It is assumed that the primary role of all parents is to influence, teach, and control their children. A parenting style is the overall pattern of the extent and focus of control.

Psychological control: "You should adapt my values, goals, and judgments."

Behavioral control: "You are expected to play by the rules of this family."

Parental responsiveness refers to "the extent to which parents intentionally foster individuality, self-regulation, and self-assertion by being attuned, supportive, and acquiescent to children's special needs and demands."[i] I refer to this characteristic in the table below as “fosters psychological independence.”

Parental demandingness refers to "the claims parents make on children to become integrated into the family whole, by their maturity demands, supervision, disciplinary efforts and willingness to confront the child who disobeys."[ii] I refer to this characteristic in the table below as “demands behavioral compliance.”

Can you start to see the parallel between parenting and our work in supervising offenders?

This is the 4th of a 7 part series on The Risk Principle Simplified.  Subscribe to our blog and get the series delivered right to your inbox.

What does "High Intensity" mean?

While the principle of matching risk level to treatment intensity level is almost universally accepted, an adequate definition of “intensity” is rarely given. The best definition is offered by Ed Latessa and Christopher Lowenkamp of the University of Cincinnati in their 2004 article titled, “Residential Community Corrections and the Risk Principle: Lessons Learned in Ohio”. The authors believe strongly in quality of treatment and have published several useful articles about its importance, but in this article they lay out a useful definition of intervention “intensity”.

• High intensity intervention equals residential placement and low intensity treatment equals non-residential treatment.  

Along with providing, in my opinion, the best definition of “intensity,” this article also provided greater evidence of the importance of matching risk level to intervention intensity.  A central finding in the study was: 

• When low risk offenders are placed in residential facilities, their rate of reoffending is higher than for low risk offenders who do not receive residential placement.

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Trust Is Like Air

I do not personally know most of you, but I’d like to take a stab at your latest marching orders from above.  Does it sound something like this? Implement EBP now!

Pretty simple right?  Use the NIC model (or stay tuned for the release of CorrectTech’s revised model soon) and implement the stated principles ASAP.  It can’t be that difficult, right?  Community Corrections has been talking about evidence based practices for decades now.  Time to walk the talk!  It will improve outcomes, public safety, communities and budgets.  It is a win-win-win.

Are We Losing Credibility?

If this has not been your marching order yet, it will be soon.  Day 1 will include googling something like “community corrections EBP implementation”.  You will find a variety of states and programs that speak eloquently about the value of EBP, but have not been able or willing to actually take the leap.  You will find other states that have demonstrated significant progress in the implementation journey.  Still other states or agencies have tried desperately for years, with sincere intentions and ample resources, only to be met with lack of results that meet up with the promise.  No wonder it is not uncommon to hear an old school criminal justice professional refer to EBP evangelism as “drinking The Kool Aid” or the “Latest Snake Oil”. 

This is the 7th of a 7 part series on The Risk Principle Simplified.  Subscribe to our blog and get the next series delivered right to your inbox.

Allowing High Risk Offenders to "Fail First"

While the danger of over-intervening with low risk offenders is generally acknowledged and respected, there is a trend toward policy makers ignoring the opposite side of the coin. For a variety of political and financial reasons, high risk offenders are receiving low intensity interventions under a “fail first model”. Instead of matching intensity of the intervention to the assessed risk level, high risk offenders are being provided low intensity interventions with the idea that when they fail, they will be provided a higher level of supervision. This policy has negative consequences for the following stakeholders: Victims, Offenders and The EBP Movement.