Documents And Artifacts: Exploring Community Corrections Training And Culture Amidst Criminal Legal Reform

Justice Reinvestment Initiatives (JRI) are one of the most prominent criminal legal system reform packages implemented over the past two decades. These Initiatives seek to help corrections departments avoid building new prisons by reserving space for the highest risk clients and pushing as many low and moderate risk clients as possible out to community corrections caseloads. To prepare community corrections officers (CCOs) to manage these clients and help reduce recidivism, a portion of the savings generated from de-carceration is reinvested in training core correctional and evidence-based practices, such as motivational interviewing an risk/need assessments. I worked as a frontline CCO in Idaho from 2014 to 2016 in the earliest days of a JRI that would, ultimately, fail to meet its objectives. Debates about this failure have largely elided occupational culture and one of the most important means of perpetuating it: new officer training. Reform success or failure will never be completely understood unless we account for the complex role practitioners and their occupational culture(s) may play during implementation. This study addresses this gap in the literature by discussing Idaho’s CCO occupational culture and how it influenced the JRI. I used autoethnography and reflexive thematic analysis to probe a comprehensive, personal archive of training documents and related materials to show that CCOs primarily hold brief surveillance meetings with clients to meet supervision standards and manage a continual onslaught of paperwork, processes, and new clients. Yet, much of CCO training focused not on this bureaucratic role, but on preparing officers for a dangerous world made so mostly by the clients they supervised. JRI attempted to pull CCOs away from this cherished public safety identity by emphasizing partnership and power-sharing. CCOs tended to believe that such a model was, ultimately, a public safety hazard. So, just as they were trained, CCOs neutralized the threat.