As part of a mission to improve success rates and decrease technical violations and escapes, Time to Change Community Corrections (TTC) has turned its treatment team meetings into training and growth development meetings under the guidance of Evan Crist, Psy.D., founder of CorrectTech. Dr. Crist is leading a shift in culture and organizational change by educating his staff members using TTC’s own data to help equip them on this mission.

I attend these meetings and am happy to be included in this exciting culture change! My goal, as CorrectTech’s customer development specialist, is to reinforce TTC’s goals for using agency data to drive decision-making in my individual community corrections staff coachings and group trainings.

I am thrilled to see the data management system in CorrectTech’s case management software being put to use in this exciting journey!

A case manager supervisor was recently assigned two projects that incorporate collecting data out of CorrectTech.

Assignment 1: What are the success rates for clients with a specific drug of choice?

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.

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.

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.