As the father of two teenage girls, any article about parenting tends to catch my attention. I found an 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?

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.

1. Labeling client’s based on their offense (aka: sex offender, murderer) could inadvertently reinforce the behaviors we don’t want to see from them. Referring to clients as people first (not just to their face but also when discussing them with colleagues, community members, etc.) is a better approach with more chances of true rehabilitation for both them and the community. We have always called our clients, clients, instead of offenders for this reason. We’ve learned the labeling of a client as a “sex offender” can have unintended impact.

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.

Reporting Nightmares No More

"You want to report on all that hard work you do with your client, right?" Words our unsung hero, the case manager, loathes hearing. Of course we know reports are important. Of course we know that done correctly, reports are vital to our clients’ progress and our success as case managers. But it’s hard to be convinced that we should take joy in completing intake, monthly or termination reports.

Reporting on a client’s progress (or lack thereof) is very important, yet community corrections case managers continually struggle with keeping up with paperwork type responsibilities, deadlines and having enough time to meet with clients in a quality fashion.

Even the best case managers aren’t able to spend the time they should with their clients because they must also keep up with compliance and paperwork requirements. You know what it is like to have to locate everything you, and others, have already done and put it into a report… every time a client intakes... every month… every incident… all of the treatment… all of the drug test outcomes… and of course every time a client terminates… and usually all of the above.