Implementing a Reentry Framework at a Correctional Facility: Challenges to the Culture (original) (raw)
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Helping and Hindering Factors for Inmates Meeting the Challenges for Successful Community Reentry
Academy of Management Proceedings, 2019
The purpose of this study was to explore the helping and hindering factors that may affect an inmate living in a Transitional Housing Unit (THU) in a Pennsylvania state prison as he prepares for community reentry, so that recommendations can be made for possible improvements to the reentry program. In January 2014, transitional housing units (THUs) began operating in six of the state correctional institutions. The THU was designed to provide reentry services to inmates who will be released to geographic areas near the institutions, thus allowing for contact with outside agencies that can provide ongoing support services for community reentry. The THU was chosen as the reentry program of study because this type of evaluative research has not been conducted in the THU in the past from the perspective of an inmate preparing for community reentry. An Enhanced Critical Incident Technique (ECIT) was used to examine what helps and hinders inmates living in the THU who are preparing for community reentry. A study group of thirty men living in the THU was identified for interviews to explore their lived experiences with community reentry preparedness. Each participant was asked how they would describe community reentry preparedness, what community reentry preparedness meant to them, and what helped and hindered, and might help (wish list items) community reentry preparedness if it was available. ECIT analysis of participant responses resulted in the identification of 1,312 critical incidents comprised of 892 helping incidents which were divided into 13 categories, 420 hindering incidents which were divided into 10 categories, and 158 wish list items which were divided into seven categories. Study limitations were reviewed, and suggestions made for further research.
Probation Journal, 2018
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Human services and the prisoner reentry industry
Dialectical Anthropology, 2010
What is really going on today when men and women coming out of prison go to work in human services-the positive, the negative, and the not easily categorized? This commentary draws critical connections between reentry industrial complex, human services workforce development, and race. Preliminary findings are offered from a pilot study that elicited perspective from human services professionals who have been formerly incarcerated. Directions for further exploration of this phenomenon are proposed.
International Journal of Qualitative Research, 2024
The implementation of correctional revitalization is not only related to structural adjustments and security protocols at Super Maximum Security (SMAX), Maximum Security (MAX), and Medium Security (MS) correctional facilities; it may also have an impact on changes in officer-inmate interaction patterns and the psychological stress officers. After the implementation of institutional revitalization, this study intends to investigate the patterns of officer-inmate interaction and the levels of stress experienced by correctional institution personnel in Nusakambangan with various degrees of security. Eight officers were interviewed as part of the research approach, which involved descriptive qualitative analysis, in four prisons on Nusakambangan Island. The analysis's findings give an example of the many ways that SMAX, MAX, and MS prison guards and convicts engage with one another. Because of restrictions on prisoners' freedom of movement, the implementation of security measures, and disparities in treatment within the development program, different interaction patterns result. Comparing convicts in XMAX and MAX prisons to those in MS prisons, authorities believe that MS prisoners spend more time outside of their rooms engaging in activities, which could compromise security and order. The result is that because inmates in MS prisons are free to roam the facility, but inmates in SMAX and MAX prisons engage in more activities in their quarters, the stress level for officers in MS prisons is higher than the stress level in SMAX and MAX prisons. communication that occurs between two or more people, which is usually not regulated formally. In interpersonal communication, each individual uses all the elements of communication, the meaning here is that there is a message sender and message recipient (Rahmi, 2021). According to correctional institutions, a communication relationship between officials and subordinates must be created in order for effective training to take place. Poor communication has an impact on stress levels for the perpetrator, causing problems in interactions. Norman and Hirdes (2020) that the rate of serious mental illness in these correctional institutions is estimated to range between 9-20% (Tamburello, Kaldany, and Dickert 2017). Correctional services (CS) increasingly take a rehabilitation and reintegration approach as a more holistic and INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
The internal crisis of corrections: Professionalization and the work environment
Justice Quarterly, 1986
Criminal justice policymakers and managers have viewed professionalization as a favored solution to the current crisis in correctional systems across the country. Utilizing case study data drawn from a state correctional system located in the western United States, we find that upgrading line correctional staff was a strategy used by top administrators to improve the image of their agency and maintain the autonomy of their prison system in the face of a threatened take-over by the federal court. However, in mandating the professionalization of their personnel, these managers failed to confront deeper organizational problems. Instead, they argued that an educated staff was the cure for acknowledged operational problems-including corruption and inhumane treatment. The failure to combine staff upgrading with more comprehensive organizational reforms merely heightened the frustrations within the workforce of the state's correctional institutions. In essence, these professionalization strategies represent a prime example of utilizing individual-level solutions to solve organizational-level problems.
THE CORRECTIONAL ORIENTATION OF PRISON WARDENS: IS THE REHABILITATIVE IDEAL SUPPORTED?*
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Over the past two decades, the ideology ostensibly governing correctional policy has been transformed, it is claimed, from liberal-rehabilitative to _ conservative-punitive. Little empirical information is available, however, ri( (/I on whether those who manage correctional institutions-prison wardensmanifest a punitive or reformative orientation to their work. Data from a national survey indicate that, while placing a prime emphasis on maintaining custody and institutional order, wardens remain supportive of rehabilitation. Levels of support for treatment, moreover, are only modestly influenced by individual, career, organizational, and contextual variables.
Criminology & Criminal Justice
As part of the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms, 70 ‘local’ prisons in England and Wales were re-designated as resettlement prisons, in order to provide additional through-the-gate support to individuals serving short sentences. Drawing on staff and prisoner interviews in one case study resettlement prison, this article considers what challenges were involved with implementing a resettlement culture in a local prison. Findings first outline factors inhibiting the resettlement status of the prison; these include a tension between attempts to implement a more expansive resettlement remit into the prison, while also fulfilling more long-standing core institutional duties; the size and churn of the prison population; wide-scale apathy caused by change fatigue; and government austerity policies which caused significant difficulties in the day-to-day staffing of the prison. This article then turns to practitioner responses to the re-designation, finding that practitioners interpreted r...
The expanding prisoner reentry industry
Dialectical Anthropology, 2010
The prisoner reentry industry (PRI) has become a major part of the Social Control Industrial Complex. As with the Prison Industrial Complex, the PRI is not just a collection of institutions, organizations, and interest groups (both public and private); it is also a state of mind. Developing and facilitating programs and services for the formerly incarcerated have become a huge ''cash-cow,'' producing profits for the PRI at the expense of the taxpayer, while doing little to link the formerly incarcerated person to the social capital and human skills necessary to become a ''citizen.'' Data that include the voices of the formerly incarcerated, members of their families, and criminal justice practitioners suggest that a person's level of success during their ''personal reentry experience'' varies in large part, by the individual parole officer they are assigned to and the number and types of programs they are required to participate in. Furthermore, their quality of life after release and their level of success is determined in large part by the program administrators managing those ''for-profit companies'' and ''non-profit/for-profit agencies,'' that supervise parolee programs. The argument here is that there must be a better system for monitoring the activities of those organizations that are in the business of facilitating prisoner reentry-related services. A process of accountability that will ensure that organizations part of the PRI are in fact providing services in the manner that was stated and agreed upon during their request for funding. The most important tool for ending this cycle lies in creating employment opportunities for the formerly incarcerated and empowering them to access those resources afforded all citizens. Consequently, if those agencies and organizations in the business of facilitating prisoner reentry were successful at making available the services they argue they do provide, members of these organizations would work themselves out of a job; that would be a valid indicator of organizational success.
This essay reveals the findings from conversations with administrators from Department of Corrections in the twelve North American states. Additionally, experts in the field of prisoner reentry in the federal government and community-based reentry programs were interviewed and the results of those interviews are presented here. This essay also relies on peer-reviewed literature that supports some of it's findings and ends with a view of some of the strategies that can be implemented to bring about change in the present system.