Best Practices in Corrections

Best Practices in Corrections

Correctional best practices

A well-established body of best practices supporting humane, decent, and effective approaches to rehabilitation exists in U.S. correctional facilities. This is particularly to high-risk offenders confined in correctional facilities. This study focuses on Correctional Health Care program as a practice contributing towards effective service delivery in various correctional centers.

Assess offender risk: risk factors tend to be static since they never change. This focuses on criminological risks and needs, which put offenders in at risk of continued criminal behavior. For instance, particular criminal acts are linked to deficits associated with lack of education, lack of employment and substance abuse (Alarid, 2013). Assessing offender risk and needs assists to identify these areas of service needs and risks. Systematically identifying and mediating in these areas of criminogenic risk and need is effective at reducing recidivism.

Enhance offender motivation: human beings respond better when motivated and not when persuaded to change their behavior. The effective principle of correctional best practice is the treatment group, which plays a vital role in recognizing the necessity to motivate and use evidence-based motivational techniques (DeLisi & Conis, 2013). For instance, motivational interviewing is a designed approach of interacting with offenders in ways that maintain and enhance interest in changing their behaviors.

A program considered to be using best practices

Prison managers insist on two best practices: preparing inmates for the safe release and safely operating their prisons. These practices are empirically connected in that poor institutional behavior is a predictor of high rates of post-release recidivism. Study after study across multiple correctional agencies and countries show that a primary method to minimize recidivism and prison misconducts is through correctional best practices (Fagan & Ax, 2011). This implies that prison administrators seek to ensure safer communities and institutions. As such, they need to offer correctional program opportunities consistent with correctional best practice.

For prisons, the preoccupation with correctional best practices goals is understandable even though it could exhaust available human and fiscal resources. This preoccupation leaves minimal resources left for the institution to achieve its commitment concerning the wider goals of public safety and effective corrections as correctional best practices. This is feasible since money spent on these programs is cost-effective (Fagan & Ax, 2011). One major strategy adopted by the prison was to incorporate its current programs with correctional best practices. This has demonstrated effective for its implementation in other programs. Therefore, prison administrators have greatly benefited from the lessons from correctional best practices.

Exemplary correction programs

Work and education programs are the widely used methods of intervention in American prisons. Obviously, the exemplariness of these programs depicts the abiding belief that work and educational skills are the best habits learned in acquiring these skills. They are integral in securing employment and leads to a productive citizen (Alarid, 2013). Although the results will not be equivocal, the existing body of literature indicates that these programs have a modest effect in minimizing post-release recidivism. This is particularly when they target certain inmates such as those with low skills. In addition, they tend to be highly useful when they are incorporated in the broader strategy, becoming a multi-modal strategy to rehabilitation of offenders.

Psychological programs: some prison programs try to change the underlying issues causing the criminality behavior of an offender. Drug abuse programs are perhaps the most common interventions. An estimated fifty percent of offenders entering prison admit having used drugs in the previous months (Fagan & Ax, 2011). Some of them have reported having used drugs at the time of their offence, which also contributed to their incarceration. In addition, there is an increase in the war against drugs as more people in prisons are linked to drug related crimes. The proportion of drug offenders in federal and state prisons has been increasing significantly.

Elements of these programs make them exemplary and will be considered as 'best practice' in the correctional field

Approximately sixty thousand inmates have been enrolled in adult education. This includes learning in core areas such as literacy, mathematics, social studies, and science and language arts. About eighty percent of prisons offer this general equivalency development program while some of them offer basic educational courses. A few prison institutions are now offering college education courses. Such elements make work and education programs effective and exemplary in the correctional field. On the other hand, there has been a decline in participation in college degree programs; inmates are legally excluded from securing grants to fund their education. A survey conducted in 2006 recorded that at least 15,000 inmates received a three-year associate's degree and 300 received a bachelor's degree (Fagan & Ax, 2011).