Beyond Implementing Evidence-Based Practice: Creating Rehabilitative Experience

And so all this brings us to “how do we get there…how do we make our methods of ‘correctional control’ (i.e., prison and probation/parole) not just effective at controlling (to serve public safety) but also effective in nudging and supporting individuals towards desistance (which also serves public safety)?” What are some of the central issues that need to be dealt with?

Rising to first in importance, in my view, is that corrections needs to take better care of its staff if we want those staff in turn to adopt a more caring and supportive ethos. Evidence shows convincingly that both community and institutional corrections staff can fall easily into compassion fatigue, feeling overextended, exhausted, unappreciated, and unnecessarily burdened and confused by the heavily monitored managerialist and accountability cultures we’ve created (Norman & Ricciardelli, 2022). There are serious consequences for mental and emotional well-being and there is evidence that the longer the staff tenure in the job, the worse it gets. Even in Canada, where our staffing ratios are more reasonable, rates of reported mental health concerns have been shown to be worrisomely high for both community corrections staff and those working in custody settings (Ricciardelli et al., 2019).

Correctional work has become a career path that may no longer be seen as especially rewarding for individuals with any semblance of human-service orientation. It may attract instead individuals with a punitive bent. Attending to staff well-being and morale has become a critical issue in the correctional world and we need to start making serious effort in responding to the emotional toll of working in our field…understanding and rooting out its causes and giving this work the respect it deserves as a demanding, multi-layered, multi-tasking human-service avocation, not just a job to cope with! Incidentally, I believe this applies whether we are talking about the probation or parole officer in the community, the social worker or psychologist working in our prisons, or the teacher, shop instructor, nurse, case manager, or prison officer. In a true EBP world, they should all be committed to the same mission of helping to turn around the disengaged and disaffected.

Part of giving correctional work the respect it deserves entails giving staff a meaningful say in how we manage and change the nature of their work. It shouldn’t be at all surprising that front-line staff will naturally interpret and modify policy and practice in their own “real world” according to their own personal values and assumptions. We need to learn how to manage the fact that many of our current EBPs can be easily misapplied, superficially applied, or even counter-productively applied. The elements may be there but the substance is often missing. For example:

• Risk/Needs Assessments may be completed, but are only perfunctorily and not used motivationally to engage individuals; are not used appropriately for referrals; or are often getting overridden, especially for lower risk cases (where these assessments are actually most accurate).
• Confirmatory bias can enter easily into correctional work where staff will tend to select and weigh information that confirms their particular views of risk, and with misperception of causality leading to simplistic solutions for managing risk.
• Assessment that is not carefully attuned and calibrated to the social/cultural context can perpetuate bias and disadvantage instead of correcting it.
• Limited available programs and services can become a “catch-all”…often used to punish non-compliance rather than addressing a real need.
• Program delivery can fall into becoming lackadaisical and uninspiring without significant facilitator skills.
• Case planning can evolve into being neither collaborative nor especially rich in substance or focus or linked with assessment.
• Since paperwork is what is typically monitored…a “CYA” mentality prevails instead of a focus on quality of relationships; interactions end up occurring mostly around procedural issues, rule enforcement, paperwork completion and data entry.
• Practice can become easily ‘routinised’, habitual and bureaucratic.
• Practice paralysis can easily emerge where even well-trained staff lose faith in the relevance of EBP for the defiant, resistant, or indifferent individual who needs a “short leash”…and so staff revert quickly to a directive, authoritarian style to regain control.

Now of course organizations will often collude in letting this lack of stick-to-itiveness to EBPs persist; through unsound policies and procedures, poor oversight and supervision of staff, lack of quality assurance for critical decision making, and an unhelpful value base with a tendency towards over-precaution and blame, etc. (Viglione, 2019). But another underpinning culprit in my view is how we have bounded and oversimplified our core concept of risk. There is a prevailing delusion in our field that because we can predict risk of reoffending to some degree better than chance, we therefore understand risk. In reality, assessing risk, and understanding what can elevate or mitigate risk for a given individual, is a continuously complex process. It requires ongoing observation and good judgment that is balanced, reasoned, unbiased, remains well informed of subtle change in circumstances, and can integrate multiple, probabilistic, and potentially conflicting cues to arrive at an understanding of the person at a given moment in time. A desistance-focused perspective also needs to consider aspirations, obstacles (including needs not directly “criminogenic”), motivation, and protective factors that can help people choose not to offend, understand how all of these elements might work together and interact, and the extent of their protective quality.

There is no simple formula that can “fix” individuals so that risk is reduced (Porporino, 2010). It depends on helping individuals unravel, and finding different ways of dealing with, a complex web of factors that can underpin risk. One of the key problems in our approach to introducing EBPs in my view is that we have turned our staff in many ways into technicians, asking them to accept the results of the tools we’ve instructed them to use, oversimplifying analysis of individual risk as captured by a limited and fairly vaguely defined set of risk factors (and more recently by asking them to accept the results of increasingly sophisticated AI algorithms even though no one really knows how they work). If we want our staff to truly embrace EBP then I would argue we need to focus instead on creating a culture of curiosity and commitment to continuous improvement in how they can conceptualize and contextualize risk, and how they can then share that understanding with individuals under their care to support disentangling their personal and particular ways out of risk (Creavin et al., 2022). Applying EBP, in essence, has to become what correctional professionals themselves define as occupational professionalism, not just what the agency asks them to do.

I would argue as well that we need to go beyond training staff in core competencies and skills and work more deliberately in attracting and developing a workforce with the attitudes and values that can coalesce rather than keep colliding with a desistance-supportive ethos. Training staff to add structure and focus can make a difference, but in the end it’s the ability of staff to develop and sustain a therapeutic correctional relationship with individuals that will matter most…what Sarah Lewis (2016) in the UK has narrowed in as encompassing: acceptance, respect, support, empathy, and belief. Adroitness in enabling and sustaining a positive relational climate, both in prisons and in the community, is at the core of effective practice. Importantly, I believe, is the fact that these relational and dispositional qualities of individuals can perhaps be developed and refined to a degree, but they are not easily trainable if they’re not there. If we want to imbue corrections with a different ethos of care and support, then we need to find ways to recruit more of the people who can do it. Incidentally, there is evidence that staff with high levels of these personal, relational qualities can have considerable impact on reoffending, as much if not more than structured interventions (Raynor et al., 2014).

I’m certainly not suggesting that we shouldn’t pursue efforts to structure practice through training, but we have to accept that staff will be typically resistant to change they didn’t ask for; implementation will be difficult and usually strain organizational capacity to monitor and correct; staff will invariably differ in how well they can learn new skills or become committed to applying them; change in how staff begin relating with offenders may emerge but unfortunately often doesn’t last; and there will always be some drift back to preferred ways when the new ways are perceived as not working. Rapid transformation isn’t possible. Welcoming staff in co-designing incremental evidence-informed change may be more successful, but what will ultimately buttress the development of a stronger rehabilitative ethos is the quality of our staff, with the attitudes, values, beliefs, and interpersonal styles that suit correctional work.

And that brings me to my last point: the importance of giving both our line staff and our managers and leaders a much more nuanced, integrated, and less confined (restricted) theoretical understanding of desistance from offending. When we cut to the chase, our work in corrections is about helping people to change and grow within a social context where they previously had difficulty adjusting and adapting. In my view, to do that means that we should embrace and apply all that we know about the human change process, not just what we might have learned from one perspective. In “the Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant,” each of the blind men is concluding something different because they are touching only one part of the elephant. Similarly, in our struggle to understand offending, if we use only one theoretical perspective, we will miss seeing the entire picture.