Section II: Implementing Practice Guidelines

Over the past 20 years, community supervision departments have made strides to improve client outcomes by adopting evidence-based practices to reduce recidivism. As the field continues to evolve, agencies struggle to improve their mode of implementing these practices. To assist supervision organizations in using the appropriateness statements to shape their policies and practices, this collection contains several implementation considerations sections. These implementation considerations operate from the perspective that supervision is most effective when taking a rehabilitative and humanistic approach to assist clients in changing their lives. Specifically, the implementation considerations cover five categories of practices (contacts, compliance-based practices, treatment, motivations, other practices) that represent many of the traditional conditions used across supervision departments nationwide.

Successful implementation strategies include: effective training for staff, adequate support from supervisors, improving staff perceptions that they have a say in the policies and procedures of the workplace, and have some autonomy within their job tasks (Gethun et al., 2008). This is in part due to the amount of discretion that front-line officers have when they work with clients. Officers exercise their discretion when determining what supervision conditions are important to emphasize, how to respond to non-compliance, and what behaviors adequately symbolize client success (Taxman, 2013). Consequently, when staff are cynical about change or perceive there are not enough resources to implement change, they will resist the changes (Rudes et al., 2011; Schlager, 2008). This resistance can be passive, such as staff claiming a lack of knowledge about a new practice or not using it in real-life client interactions. Staff resistance can also be active such as staff acknowledging the new practice but openly professing the old way was better (Lerch et al., 2011).

The attitudes that staff hold about change are not static. Instead, they are shaped by the organization’s readiness to change and how the change is implemented (Lerch et al., 2011; Steiner et al., 2011). Organizational factors associated with organizational readiness include: organizational climate, staff commitment to the organization, and resource availability (Lerch et al., 2011). Measuring organizational readiness allows administrators to understand the specific challenges that organization has when introducing new policies or practices. Addressing these challenges prepares an organization’s staff for the change process.

Once it is determined that a supervision organization is ready for a new policy or practice, it is recommended that they go through a systematic process to transfer the knowledge from theory into practice. Technology transfer is the process of taking science-based findings and moving the studied practice into general operations (Taxman & Belenko, 2011). Based on evidence, some factors that organizations should consider when preparing to transfer technology to their staff are:

• determining whether the rehabilitative or punitive nature of the innovation represents a departure from current and past organization culture
• developing several channels (formal and informal) of communication that provide a consistent message supporting the innovation
• determining the proper timing for implementing the innovation
• measuring and tracking changes in the social structure of the organization during the implementation process (Rogers, 2003; Taxman & Belenko, 2011)

The following implementation suggestions are based on the framework presented by Taxman (2013). In this framework, Taxman suggests that there are seven core strategies to making evidence-based practices stick in supervision organizations. These include:

Acknowledging that many departments have worked hard to implement some of these practices already, the intention of these appropriateness statements is to provide departments with a comprehensive vision of how they can supplement their current efforts to attain better outcomes. The seven core strategies covered above provide a general overview of what community corrections organizations can do to prepare themselves structurally for implementing change. The following pages also include more specific implementation considerations that take these seven core strategies and tailor them for use in particular types of supervision practices (e.g., compliance-based, treatment).

The first four strategies are structural—changes that are most effective when implemented as the foundation to introducing new changes. The final three strategies are able to address the specific considerations of the various practices. For instance, a supervision agency will have to consider these three strategies when attempting to reduce the number of compliance-based practices they use. As such, each of the following implementation considerations sections will be focused on the final three strategies presented above. These considerations are useful tools to help supervision organizations clarify what is needed to set themselves up for success when implementing new practices.

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