Chapter 6
Extended Applications of Supportive Authority
Why Offenders Need Help
Offenders need help to change not because they are sick and need to be cured, but because they are personally invested in ways of thinking that grant permission and justification for them to offend. We can diagnose them as having antisocial personality disorder or as psychopaths – we can list the criteria for these designations and some offenders surely meet them – but those labels add nothing useful to us, or to them, that we do not already know. By acting on their pro-offending attitudes, offenders experience self-worth, self-efficacy, and personal identity. Offenders respond to society’s efforts to make them change in terms of these same pro-offending attitudes: both punishment and treatment are perceived as threatening their personal system of cognition and behavior within which they experience their identity as persons. And they are right.
Hard-core offenders are rigidly and dogmatically attached to their pro-offending ways of thinking. They are determined to exclude any influence that challenges their entitlement to do and be as they alone decide. In the privacy of their own mind they are kings, and they rule that domain as tyrants. The pro-offending thinking of less-than-hard-core offenders is more likely to be reinforced than diminished by their encounters with the criminal justice system. They too have adopted and acted on pro-offending attitudes. By the time they enter the criminal justice system almost all offenders will have derived some measure of self-efficacy and self-worth by acting on these attitudes. To whatever extent offenders hold to pro-offending attitudes as shaping the direction and meaning of their behavior, by just that measure they have a personal stake in resisting change.
Hard-core and not-so-hard-core offenders both attach themselves to their pro-offending attitudes by acts of their own willful agency. They do not create their attitudes out of thin air, but whatever the environmental, biological, and genetic influences (the “external causes”) of their pro-offending attitudes, offenders make them their own by thinking them and acting on them. The conflict between offenders and authority becomes a battle of wills.
The trap of offenders’ thinking is a trap of their own making, but it is a trap nevertheless, and a particularly insidious one. To change their lives offenders need only change the way they think: but their determination to think as they do is exactly what creates the trap of their own thinking. They need help to find their way out of it, and that is no simple thing. The force of authority meets with automatic resistance. Treatment meets with lack of engagement and lack of motivation. Left alone, offenders continue to live within a self-reinforcing system of pro-offending thinking and behavior. This is the dilemma of correctional change.
We propose a strategy of intervention of a different order. The most promising solution, we suggest, lies not in new techniques of treatment (not even our own), but in coordinating and unifying the elements of criminal justice. We look to Supportive Authority as the key.
Not Either/Or: Some Promising Examples
In Chapter 4 we described a team of corrections officers at the prison in St. Albans, Vermont, USA, who delivered Cognitive Self Change to violent offenders. These officers facilitated treatment groups while maintaining their responsibility for security and control for these same inmates. Versions of the same program delivered to incarcerated violent offenders in England and in Northern Ireland also used uniformed corrections officers to facilitate treatment groups. This particular treatment process (CSC) is not technically clinical, and it does not ask offenders to reveal information about themselves (or their fellow offenders) that they believe needs to be kept secret from authorities. That removes two basic barriers to communication, but not the more basic and institutional conflict between guards and inmates, the attitudinal barrier of “us versus them.” That barrier was overcome by the realization, by officers and inmates alike, that there is really no conflict at all. Officers collaborated with inmates in a process of change and at the same time enforced the rules of the institution. Inmates were subject to officers’ control and at the same time collaborated with these officers in a process of change. The realization that this was possible had profound implications for treatment. The goal of offenders’ cooperation with the authority of the law – a goal that is central to all correctional treatment – was practiced in a limited but concrete and meaningful form within the process of treatment itself.
Barriers to achieving that collaboration are deeply embedded in institutional practice. In Vermont, the use of corrections officers in treatment fell victim to its own success. When the program was expanded beyond a single prison to all prisons in the state, and at the same time made a “mandatory” condition of release for violent offenders, the practice of corrections officers facilitating treatment groups came to an end. In Vermont (as with most states in the United States) prison officers are “unionized,” meaning that their professional organization represents their interests – conditions and scope of work, pay, and job security – in contract negotiations with the state. Treatment was beyond corrections officers’ traditional scope of work, and rather than renegotiate their job description (and the pay that goes with it), an administrative decision was made to return all corrections officers to their traditional roles of security and control. Treatment fell to corrections counselors and contracted therapists. In England, corrections psychologists gradually replaced the few uniformed officers who delivered CSC treatment. Both systems continued to provide treatment as a basic correctional service, delivered for the most part by corrections employees. In many other jurisdictions, correctional treatment continues to be regarded as an add-on to the “real business” of corrections, rather on the order of dental care or medical services – necessary perhaps, but a distraction from the main business of the institution.
One of the corrections officers described above who delivered CSC in Vermont, Brian Bilodeau, later developed a communication technique for corrections officers based on asking offenders to explain their thoughts and feelings at a time the officer observed them carrying out a particular behavior. It was used in situations when an inmate carried out a behavior that was perhaps inappropriate, but was not technically a violation of the rules. It was also applied after an offender had violated a rule, but only after that violation had been dealt with and disposed of. The key premise is that the offender does not risk punitive consequences by telling someone in authority about his thoughts and feelings. Bilodeau described the process as both “intrusive” and “respectful.”
An officer initiates a conversation with words such as, “I saw you slam down the receiver of the phone a few minutes ago. I wonder if you would be willing to talk to me for a few minutes about that. I am curious about what was going through your mind …” Or, “The other day you attacked your roommate. That is in the past now, but I wonder if you would be willing to talk to me about it. I am curious …”
If inmates do not want to talk, the officer leaves it at that. If they do, the conversation continues until the inmate presents a reasonably clear picture of their thoughts and feelings, and of how these thoughts and feelings led them to do whatever they did. There is no effort to enter into a process of counseling or treatment. The key to Cognitive–Reflective Communication lies in the officers’ ability to be nonthreatening, and to convey genuine curiosity, interest, and respect for inmates’ freedom (and right) to decide for themselves whether to enter the conversation. Bilodeau trained officers in Vermont and several hundred officers in the states of Kansas and Idaho in the technique of CRC. The training was intensive: two weeks of role-playing many possible interactions with offenders. Training concentrated on officers reframing their own attitudes toward inmates. CRC was put into practice first in individual cellblocks, then in entire prisons. Administrators were also trained.
A similar technique of communication has been developed by one of the authors (DH) as a tool available to a variety of corrections staff: counselors, probation officers, and others. Harris calls the technique “Curious Cognitive Inquiry.”
There is a powerful case for not separating the functions of enforcement from the service of treatment. In the language of Supportive Authority, when respect for offenders’ autonomy and provision of meaningful opportunity to change are isolated from enforcement of the rules, enforcement of those rules is at risk of reverting to its most basic and primitive tool: punishment and the threat of punishment. To the extent that that happens, enforcement and treatment literally work at cross-purposes. When used alone, punishment reinforces the attitudes of resentment and defiance of authority that treatment tries to change.
Psychologists tell us that for effective correctional control, reinforcement should dominate punishment by a ratio of 4:1 or higher (Gendreau, Listwan, Kuhns, & Exum, 2014). In common practice – and in the minds of offenders – the difference between punishment and reward is often a distinction without a difference. It is common practice in many prisons to control inmates’ behavior by “rewarding” them for compliance. This practice is more effective in securing inmates’ compliance than it is in mollifying their attitudes of resentment. Offenders tend to perceive their “rewards” as their just due, and withholding them as punishment.
A frequent conversation in one American institution that awarded “points” for good behavior is:
| offender: | You took my point. Why did you take my point? |
| officer: | I didn’t take it. You failed to earn it. |
| offender: | You took it. |
| officer: | No, you failed to earn it. |
| offender: | I can’t have my visit this weekend because you took my point. |
| officer: | I didn’t take it …. |
And on and on.
The conflict between “us and them” in corrections continues to be the bane of correctional change. Parts of the criminal justice system that carry out their role exclusively in terms of blame and punishment will – as long as there are such parts – perpetuate the very conflict they are trying to win.
Figure 6.1 The Us versus Them Cycle: An Escalating Conflict of Attitudes and Actions
Repeat offenders’ resistance to, and defiance of, authority is grounded in a structure of cognition, emotion, and motivation in terms of which they experience the world around them, themselves, and their own behavior (Chapter 3). That structure rests on attitudes, beliefs, and personal principles that provide unity and meaning to the world in which they live, and a meaningful place for themselves within that world. Their pro-offending attitudes, beliefs, and personal rules provide self-worth, self-efficacy, and self-identity from offending, and feelings of diminishment by compliance with social conventions and laws. This broad generalization takes concrete form in the specific beliefs, attitudes, and personal rules of individual offenders, and those offenders’ specific patterns of offending behavior (Chapters 1 and 2). Repeat offenders perceive society’s efforts to make them change (the criminal justice system) as a personal threat to their perception of the world and their way of experiencing themselves as a participant in that world. And (once again) they are right.
When society presents itself to offenders solely in terms of its power to punish, their outward compliance (such as it is) masks their inward resistance and resentment. If we present ourselves as clinicians, the presumption that there is something wrong with them that needs to be fixed triggers that same resistance. If we present ourselves as moralists, their response is the same. From offenders’ point of view, the price of compliance is simply too high.
Society cannot, and should not, permit offenders to offend, and hence cannot approve the structures of cognition, feeling, and motivation that give rise to their offending behavior. But we (society, the criminal justice system) are severely limited in what we can do to change that. We can control offenders’ behavior by force, or by carefully managed systems of rewards and punishments, but lasting change needs to take place at another level: in the attitudes, beliefs, and personal rules that make offending behavior appear to their minds as permissible, justified, and even necessary, and provide an experience of gratification, self-efficacy, and self-worth by doing it.
The most effective forms of correctional treatment are those that do just that (Lipsey, Landenberger, & Wilson, 2007). But even the most effective forms of treatment continue to struggle against offenders’ lack of engagement in treatment, lack of motivation to change, and the perception that the system of which that treatment is a part is a personal threat – all of which are most acute in those offenders at highest risk of reoffending as measured by actuarial risk assessment instruments, and by those we call “hard-core.”
Recent authors have pointed out that correctional treatment has reached something of a ceiling of effectiveness (Porporino, in Brayford, et al., 2010). A reasonable partial explanation for this is that correctional treatment is packaged and delivered as a discreet and relatively small process within a much larger context of criminal justice.
The criminal justice system is, however else it might be described, a network of people acting within complex patterns of interaction: policemen and policewomen, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, jailors, case managers, probation officers, a myriad support people that facilitate the processes, the offender, sometimes his or her family and friends, and, occasionally, treatment providers. It is no surprise if the effect of treatment on the lives of offenders is diluted by the overpowering intrusion of the system as a whole.
Criminality (we suggest) is not a discreet clinical entity (a pathology or a deficit) that can be repaired in one department, while the rest of the system deals with other aspects of the problem. The attitudes that lead repeat offenders to offend are embedded in their larger view of life. Their attitudes toward the police who arrested them, the judge who sentenced them, the officers who control them, and the counselors and therapists who offer to help them, are part and parcel of the attitudes that led them to offend in the first place. These are the attitudes targeted for change in cognitive treatment. Even when different parts of the criminal justice system do not blatantly contradict each other (as happens, for instance, when dehumanizing conditions of incarceration contradict the goals and methods of treatment), the different parts of that system typically operate in isolation, their messages to offenders uncoordinated and inconsistent.
Several jurisdictions in Australia, Britain, and America are making efforts to change this state of affairs. These efforts at coordination are broadly consistent with the authors’ idea of Supportive Authority, and with our more general recommendation to pay attention to how offenders experience our (society’s) attempts to intervene in their behavior.
The conflict between “us and them” continues to be the bane of correctional change. It is against this background that we propose the concept of Supportive Authority. Supportive Authority tempers the message of enforcement with the message of opportunity. It tempers the message of opportunity with the message of enforcement. And respect for offenders’ autonomy – their ability and unassailable freedom to adopt and commit themselves to whatever attitudes, beliefs, and personal rules they choose – underlies both.
The examples below suggest that policy makers in criminal justice are beginning to see the need to rethink old assumptions. Each of these examples integrates disparate aspects of criminal justice into one coordinated intervention. All conceive and frame that intervention as a message to offenders. All pay special heed to how that message is received.
The System as the Intervention: Some Recent Examples
The Boston Gun Project and “Ceasefire”
The criminologist David Kennedy, along with several colleagues, developed a strategy of intervention in response to the gun violence being committed by street gangs in Boston in 1995. Its target was this specific form of violence, not crime in general, and the strategy focused on gangs, not individual perpetrators (Kennedy, 2009). The project was regarded as successful and has since been applied in several other American cities. Kennedy’s ideas have been publicized in popular media, and have gained a broad spectrum of support from police officers, social service workers, and at least some gang members.1
Kennedy has a social perspective on crime and intervention quite different from the individual focus of the current authors. The core of his strategy is not treatment, but deterrence. The elements of that strategy are conceived in terms of conditions necessary to make deterrence work. The goal is not internal cognitive and emotional change in individual offenders, but the perception by gang members that continued violence comes at too high a cost. Nevertheless, the elements of Kennedy’s strategy are strikingly similar to the elements of Supportive Authority.
Kennedy identifies deterrence with sanctions, and defines sanctions as “anything that exacts a cost” (2009: 32). Kennedy measures that cost not by what those in authority declare it to be, but by what matters to offenders and what they perceive as punishment. Central to his strategy is what he calls “radical subjectivity.” Using an expression that could as well have come from the present authors, he says, “Punishment is in the eye of the beholder.”
Kennedy (like the current authors) recognized that law enforcement by itself fails to deter the violence committed by street gangs. His strategy was to combine the influences of law enforcement, social services, and representatives of the community in a unified message to gangs operating on the streets of Boston. His formula (later dubbed “Ceasefire”) contains several key elements:
- Face to face meetings (called “forums”) are created between gang members, police, community spokespersons, and social service providers. Gang members on probation are ordered by their probation officers to attend. Gang members already in jail are brought to the meeting. At these forums, police, community spokespersons, and social service providers all speak to the gang members.
- The message from law enforcement is that gun violence (or drug sales) has to stop, and if it does not stop there will be severe consequences. The recipient of these consequences will be the whole gang, not just the perpetrators of the violence. And consequences will be enforced, not just for acts of violence, but for every transgression committed by any gang member anywhere: “drug use, gun carrying, outstanding warrants, probation and parole violations, unregistered cars, anything we can find out about.” Behind this message is the fact that the police are almost always aware of many violations committed by gang members that do not always rise to the level of arrestable offenses. Evidence of these is noted – “banked” in the language of Ceasefire – and presented at the forums as proof that the police can, if they choose, enforce the law in a way that makes life distinctly uncomfortable to the whole gang.
- Members of the community – ministers, parents of murdered children, neighborhood residents – speak to the gang members with the message that the community values them, wants them to be part of the community, and needs them to be alive and out of prison. This message of inclusion is accompanied by a moral one: their behavior is wrong and needs to stop.
- Social service providers offer concrete help. If gang members choose to leave the streets, they will get help finding jobs. If they need education or training, they will get it. If they need drug treatment, they will get that.
Forums are orchestrated so that a unified message is delivered “with one voice” (Kennedy’s term). Credibility is everything. Everyone concentrates on how their message is being received in the gang members’ own minds.
Anecdotal reports from gang members indicate that the forums were taken seriously, and had the desired effect. A gang member in Cincinnati said, “During the cops’ presentation, I wasn’t really listening. Some guys around me were snoring. They were being the typical tough cops, threatening us and whatnot. But you got to understand – threats mean nothing to these guys.” But this young man listened to the whole message, and within a few weeks took up the offer of help and got a straight job (Ulriksen, 2009).
Kennedy thinks of the Ceasefire intervention as primarily a form of deterrence. The enforcement component – the threat of punishment, the unacceptable “cost” of continued offending – is the main operational principle. (There have been some indications of conflict between participants at the forums that represent deterrence and those that advocate for social services and inclusion (Ulriksen, 2009).)
Kennedy emphasizes two aspects of that deterrence: collective punishment of the whole gang for the violence committed by its individual members, and the application of a broad range of sanctions in addition to the formal sanctions (the official sentence) prescribed for committing specific crimes. He advocates the “creative application of formal and informal sanctions” in order to “exact costs” for offending behavior. He gives the example of the government’s prosecution of the American gangster, Al Capone. The government was unable to convict Capone for his many criminal and violent activities, so they brought charges that no one had considered. Capone was convicted for tax evasion, for which he was sentenced to 11 years in prison.
These aspects of Kennedy’s strategy go beyond the concept of Supportive Authority, or the personal recommendations of the current authors. Kennedy’s “cost–benefit” framework of deterrence is different from Supportive Authority’s message of enforcement. The enforcement message of Supportive Authority is that we, society, will arrest offenders and reduce their ability to offend by imposing supervision or incarceration: that is, the normal and official provisions of criminal sentencing. This is uncomfortable, and it matters to offenders only because it is uncomfortable, but it is a quite different strategy than deliberately causing pain to force compliance. Supportive Authority does not attempt to intimidate. Supportive Authority presents enforcement of the law as a stone wall: it hurts only when you run headlong into it.
There are nevertheless several clear parallels between Ceasefire and Supportive Authority. Both are conscious and deliberate acts of communicating a message from authority to offenders. Both combine uncompromising enforcement of the law with personal – and personally meaningful – opportunity to participate in society. Opportunity is presented as an invitation. Both pay attention to the offenders’ point of view and how offenders experience the message of authority. Both avoid the alienating message of exclusion, and mitigate the attitudinal barriers of “us versus them.”
The authors see these similarities as more important than the differences. Supportive Authority and Ceasefire come together on an overriding message of inclusion presented to offenders as an opportunity and an invitation, and both present this invitation against the promise of strict enforcement of the law. Both confront offenders with a choice.
American Community Courts
More than 30 “community courts” in America combine the authority of sentencing with the provision of human services. These services target factors perceived by authorities to be linked to criminal behavior, particularly substance abuse, mental health issues, and unemployment. This is accomplished by incorporating access to treatment and social services within the criminal case management process and the supervision of individual case plans under the authority of the court (Johnstone, 2001; Kilmer & Sussell, 2014).
The goal of community courts is to reduce recidivism by addressing factors the authorities perceive as associated with crime, especially substance abuse, mental health problems, and unemployment. Instead of a punitive sentence, the offender is presented with a case plan tailored to his or her individual needs. Adherence to the treatment plan is monitored and enforced by the court. All treatment plans require offenders to abstain from criminal behavior. Offenders who fail to meet the conditions of their treatment plan are referred back to a traditional court for sentencing.
Community courts are typically tied to specific neighborhoods within cities. The goal is to provide ready access by offenders to community services as well as to engage community stakeholders – residents, business owners, and others – in the process of rehabilitation. Case plans typically include community service and restorative justice components in which offenders “make amends” to the community.
Community courts typically focus on lower-level offenses, excluding cases of serious violence and most sexual offenses. The first community court in America, the Midtown Community Court in New York City, gave special attention to prostitution, including the customers of prostitutes (Sviridoff et al., 2002).
One such court is the San Francisco Community Justice Center. From its opening in 2009 through to December 2013, the court heard almost 10,000 cases involving approximately 6,000 defendants. Referral criteria to the Community Justice Center are geographical (offenses must be committed within its catchment area) and by type of offense (theft, drug possession, and disorderly conduct are explicitly eligible; felony violence, drunk driving, and offenses involving guns are explicitly ineligible). Unlike many community courts, the Community Justice Center does not exclude offenders whose current offense is a low level of violence, or who have prior convictions for more serious acts of violence (Kilmer & Sussell, 2014).
In a thoughtfully designed outcome study, Kilmer and Sussell sought to measure the Justice Center’s effects on recidivism. Their research design reflects the challenges of measuring the recidivism effects of a complex and dynamic process: temporal and geographical variations of cases considered by the court, the identification of comparable cases outside the purview of the court, and the comparison of recidivism effects. Kilmer and Sussell compared one-year re-arrest rates of cases eligible for referral to the Criminal Justice Center with similar cases that occurred in nearby neighborhoods, but outside the catchment area of the court. They conclude that the probability of re-arrest for those originally arrested outside the court’s catchment area increased over time, while the probability of re-arrest for those arrested within that catchment area decreased over time. Their conservative models calculated the decrease in probability of re-arrest within one year as between 8.9% and 10.3%.
Other measures of outcomes of other community courts have been more optimistic, ranging from an estimated 20% reduction of recidivism for the East of the River Community Court in the District of Columbia (Westat, 2012) to 42–60% for the Red Hook Community Court, New York (Lee et al., 2013). A study by Frazer (2006) concluded that the Community Justice Center in Red Hook was perceived by defendants as “more fair” than traditional courts.
The evidence for the effectiveness of America’s community courts and Kennedy’s Ceasefire intervention is promising, but tentative. As reassuring as these outcomes are, the current authors’ interest lies in a different direction: in the strategies and principles underlying these interventions and the potential for applying them elsewhere.
Community courts deal with “low-level” offenses. Ceasefire deals with gun violence, which by any measure is high-level crime, but the intervention is narrow in scope. It targets only street gangs. The majority of criminal offenses and the offenders who commit them lie beyond the reach of both. The authors suggest that the strategies and principles underlying these interventions are applicable to practically all offenses and practically all offenders.
The National Offender Management System in England and Wales
The National Offender Management Model (NOMM), and its implementation, the National Offender Management System (NOMS), embraces several principles similar to those advocated in this book, including continuity of individual case management, the integration of human services with correctional supervision, and developing personal relationships with offenders. The model takes account – at least in principle – of how offenders experience the system they find themselves in, and conceives the rehabilitative process as the integrated result of all aspects of that system (Maguire and Raynor, in Brayford, et al., 2010).
The authors are optimistic about the trends represented by the NOMS initiative, as well as previous examples described in this chapter. They indicate that criminal justice jurisdictions in the English-speaking world are recognizing the need to move beyond fragmented efforts at control and punishment and treatment. Some are moving toward comprehensive and integrated systems that include respect for offenders’ human capacity to choose.
It is the major ambition of this book to promote exactly that end.
Supportive Authority, Revisited
Supportive Authority embraces these general principles of intervention:
- engage offenders in the intervention;
- include genuine – personally meaningful and realistic – opportunity to live within the law;
- make a genuine offer of support;
- respect offenders’ freedom to choose; and
- combine the proposed intervention with strict enforcement of the law.
These strategies and principles apply to hard-core offenders as much as they do to any other offender. Hard-core offenders pose a particular challenge to the message of opportunity. The challenge to correctional service providers is to communicate the opportunity to change – and, connected with that, the opportunity to live a satisfying life within the law – so that even hard-core offenders can recognize that opportunity as realistic and achievable.
Acknowledging the possibility of change by offenders – hard-core and not-so-hard-core alike – translates into respect for their freedom and ability to choose. The challenge to us is to present choices to them that they can recognize as real, realistic, and achievable.
Imagine a young man who lives in a high-crime neighborhood. In America, this might be “the projects” in any number of neighborhoods in any number of large cities. In Britain, it might include amongst others, deprived areas of London, Manchester, the Midlands, Belfast, or Glasgow. In Australia, it might be neighborhoods in Cabramatta or Fairfield. Imagine this young man associating with peers who have little ambition to leave the ’hood or to live any way of life other than those they see around them. He and his friends seldom attend school. He sees drug dealers living in high style. He sees neighbors and family members struggling to get by on meager salaries as doormen in fancy hotels and restaurants, or cab drivers, or maids, or other menial jobs. He has a very narrow view of the world and his potential place in it. His risk of offending is high. His risk of entering the criminal justice system is high. His risk of reoffending is high.
That generic description applied to several dozen young men and women referred to a community Cognitive Self Change program in Hartford, Connecticut. They had committed minor offenses and were considered at risk of reoffending with more serious crimes. The challenge to treatment providers was to present change – in this case the steps of Cognitive Self Change – as not just a technical possibility, but as being useful and relevant to their lives. Treatment providers had to struggle, not just with these young men’s and women’s perceptions and interpretations of their life circumstances – their pro-offending ways of thinking – but with the objective and dire facts of their life circumstances.
Imagine a young man who grew up in very different circumstances. His family is relatively wealthy. They live in a low-crime neighborhood. He attends good schools. The family enjoys respect and status in the community. To all outward appearances, he has “all the advantages.” But from a young age this person acts selfishly and irresponsibly. He lies and cheats and steals – from his family and everyone around him. He is disciplined at home and at school, but punishment only makes him sullen and resentful. As a teenager he commits minor thefts, he uses and sells small quantities of illegal drugs, he manipulates his family with promises to change. His offenses bring him into the juvenile justice system, and eventually into the adult system with a long sentence of incarceration.
An offender whose life fits this description had been working on Step Two of Cognitive Self Change (identify the connection between your thoughts and feelings and your offending behavior). He came to what, for him, was a disturbing realization:
The only time I feel really good about myself is when I’m doing something I’m not supposed to be doing, and getting away with it.
Readers with a liberal bent may find it easy to sympathize with offenders who live in dire social circumstances. The familiar “liberal point of view” sees a need to help rather than to punish, and most especially a need to change these kind of social conditions. Readers with a hard-edged conservative bent may view these same offenders – and the whole community in which they live – as bringing their plight upon themselves by their lack of responsibility and ambition. Both miss the point. All these offenders experience themselves and the world around them as presenting little opportunity – to their own eyes – of living within the law in a way that promises any real hope of meeting their needs for self-worth, self-efficacy, and meaningful identity. That, we suggest, is the cold fact and the starting point of intervention. Blame and excuses are distractions. The “trap of their own thinking” is, to some degree and in an important way, a trap of their own making – offenders (like everyone else) make their interpretation of their circumstances their own by living it – but it is a trap nevertheless.
Society cannot afford to first improve social conditions before it deals with offending behavior. Offenders, like all of us, must live in the world the way it is, or not at all. To the extent that criminal justice pursues the goal of offender change (not everyone agrees this is its proper goal), it needs to deal with the cold facts of how offenders experience the world, themselves, their offending behavior, and society’s efforts to stop them. These patterns of experience lie at the root of the problem. We ignore that fact at our own cost.
An Idealistic Proposal (with modest expectations)
The combined messages and strategies of Supportive Authority present a useful guide and compass. Supportive Authority applies to all offenders and all types of offenses. It is not a formula for automatic success, but it points a direction and a path. It does not sacrifice or compromise enforcement of the law. It presents offenders with a meaningful opportunity – meaningful to them – to change and to participate (as past-offenders) in society. It presents both support to achieve change and the promise of enforcement of the law in terms of a choice offenders can and must make for themselves. Supportive Authority does not promise more than it can deliver. It promises to enforce the law not with perfect efficiency, but to the best of its ability. It offers offenders opportunity to change and to participate in society not as a guarantee, but as a realistic possibility that both offenders and those in authority can work to achieve. It offers collaboration between us and them both as the goal to be reached and the means of reaching it.
And it all holds together. There is no contradiction or inconsistency in the combined messages of Supportive Authority. For many of us (the authors include themselves) recognizing that fact demands that we abandon old habits of thinking. This, we suggest, is just what the problem calls for.
We take a moment for unadulterated idealism: we suggest that Supportive Authority works as a comprehensive and unifying strategy – an underlying philosophy – of criminal justice. Supportive Authority calls for the elements and departments of the criminal justice system to work closely together – more closely than they do now. It calls for administrators to make communication and coordination of the messages of criminal justice concrete and practical. (Like other idealistic slogans, the elements of Supportive Authority – enforcement, support, respect – risk being put on plaques on walls, and left there, unattended.) It calls for police, prosecution, the judiciary, and corrections to perform their special roles while consciously and deliberately conveying a common message. It calls for each element of the system, and each individual employee, to understand what the other elements of the system are doing, and to contribute to the collective message. Support for change defines a direction and goal for social services. In the context of Supportive Authority, a genuine offer of support, enforcement of the law, and respect for the fact that offenders’ alone can and will determine how they respond to our message, are all acts of communication. Supportive Authority demands that representatives of the criminal justice system have (or acquire) a high order of communication skill. The message of Supportive Authority is ultimately delivered and received by individuals.
Among the components of criminal justice, departments of corrections have the most extensive opportunity to communicate with offenders, and the best opportunity to control the conditions that make communication possible. (The very term reflects the idea, more fashionable in times gone by, that the mission of corrections is to correct.) In these terms, prisons present the most opportunity of all. As the system functions now, prisons are the least effective environment to deliver correctional treatment (Andrews, Zinger, Hoge, Bonta, Gendreau, & Cullen, 1990). As a component of a system informed by Supportive Authority, the basic responsibility of prisons does not end with security and control. In the terms of Supportive Authority, correctional programs are doorways of opportunity. Corrections can present pathways of change leading to participation in society. Within every program each offender’s willingness to participate, to engage, to make the effort to learn, can itself be presented as an opportunity and a choice. Every decision can be a fork in the road. For that to happen, those in authority need to have a vision of such a road, and strive to make it real.
The authors envision a better criminal justice system, but we do not advocate abrupt or dramatic change. As we have advocated with our own treatment program, the wiser course is to move forward in small steps. We put the ideas derived from our own experience to the test of further experience. So it can be with the idea of Supportive Authority. We gave several examples earlier in this chapter. Small jurisdictions – individual courts, municipal and area-wide corrections systems, individual prisons, and community probation services – can try on and try out the strategies of Supportive Authority. In what seems to be a growing trend, some are already doing so. We hope to encourage that trend.