Working outside the comfort of competence in a corrections centre

Abstract

Contrary to popular myth, modern prison environments are often workplaces that embrace change and reform. Stakeholders such as policy makers, managers and administrators currently look for innovative ways to rehabilitate offenders and re-integrate them back into the community, rather than continuing to incarcerate offenders to reduce harm to the community. In some cases, innovative models of offender rehabilitation require new ways of working among staff, whose typical roles are functional and well-defined within the disciplines of custody, medical care, counselling, education and probation and parole. This paper discusses the informal workplace learning experiences of staff members working through a new model for offender rehabilitation at a corrections centre. Our findings are developed from examining daily work and critical incidents as change triggers through observations and semistructured interviewing. The deliberate multi-disciplinary staff team approach adopted by the director of the centre has been a significant change intervention that has challenged work roles and work practices. Yet in environments of ongoing and rapid change, it is the emergent quality of creative human interactions that generates understandings of collective competence (Boreham 2004, 2007) rather than individuals staying within the comfort of individual competence. Such relationallyconstructed learning that require ‘working in the overlaps’, signal a possible convergence between theories of workplace learning and organisational change/development that can reshape human resource development (HRD) research and practice and improve understandings of learning. Aim and Purpose This paper describes and assesses the significance of the informal workplace learning experiences of staff during the first year of implementation of an innovative offender rehabilitation program. The program features various innovations: • A radical new model for treating convicted drug offenders. • Staff required to work as a multi-disciplinary team to deliver inter-professional care, thereby challenging long-embedded individual and group work roles. • Dynamically-designed organisational work practices that emerge from pragmatic and creative interactions. Our purpose is to illustrate through discussion of our empirical findings that theories of organisational change (OC) and development (OD) and theories of workplace learning can provide useful insights for each other’s respective domains, signalling a possible convergence and recognition of the intimate connection between learning and development. We begin by describing the context of the drug offender treatment program and the research methodology used to produce the case study. Next, we highlight how staff are being challenged by working outside the boundaries of traditional roles and competencies and what this implies for their understandings of learning and identity within a chaotic yet creative operating environment. In our discussion of these findings, we examine their implications for a nexus of selected theories of workplace learning and theories of organisational change and development. We suggest some conclusions about situations like this, where multi-disciplinary teams are formed, employing individuals who must draw from disciplinary competencies and also learn to connect and enhance their expertise in novel holistic ways. Case study: A new model of therapeutic jurisprudence The drug offender treatment program at the corrections centre (we use the pseudonym Program) that constitutes this case study is a pilot endeavour among various stakeholders, including judiciary, corrective services and health authorities. The humanistic concept of therapeutic jurisprudence (Wexler & Winick 1991) suggests the law should be positive or neutral, not punitive with respect to individuals in society and the desire to operationalise this concept as a rehabilitation framework is the basis for the design and implementation of this program. Program is structured as a three-stage progressive model with offenders being initially incarcerated to focus on cognitive and behavioural therapies that encourage pro-social behaviours and improved states of psychological well-being. They then move onto later stages that create possibilities to be partially and then fully located in the community with supervisory monitoring. A significant point of differentiation is the desire by the centre director to adopt a systemic and organisation-wide perspective to change. This means not only addressing offenders’ cognitive and behavioural predispositions at an individual level, but also their surrounding organisational climate as shaped by interactions with staff at the centre. Over forty staff work at the centre, including custodial officers, alcohol and drug counsellors, psychotherapists, probation and parole officers, education officers and medical practitioners. Staff contribute their professional expertise, working in new structures (e.g. the weekly integration meeting) and as a multi-disciplinary team in joint interactions with offenders and by co-facilitating activities. Thus staff operate in quite different working and learning modes than at other correctional centres or gaols where functions are distinct and coordinated. Our case study focused only on the work and learning of staff, not the offenders. Research methodology As part of a broader research program on workplace learning, we have been examining how practitioners make judgements and decisions in specific challenging incidents or initiatives within their organisations. We have focused on understanding the nature of learning that emerges from the conduct of work required for organisational outcomes; work that is performed individually but most often with others – what we call informal learning (Hager & Halliday 2006) in contrast to more structured forms of learning that occur in formal education or training. We used a mix of qualitative data collection methods. We observed staff in action over multiple days as they interacted with offenders and/or their professional colleagues. We interviewed staff as individuals or in small groups using semi-structured interviewing protocols, most often scheduling interviews after observations so that we could probe particular events and activities in which we as external researchers and staff jointly experienced. In addition, we reviewed written organisational materials about the program, working committee minutes and other textual materials produced by staff. In the interpretive tradition, we typically asked research participants to critically reflect on past activities, their own roles and those of others, and to make observations about how they as individuals, or as members of teams or groups, understood work and learning within an environment of constant change. Here, a recent event of several offenders unexpectedly regressing back to the centre after partial release to the community plus an offender death became critical incidents that challenged the confidence of staff and tested the assumptions behind traditional and new modes of behaviour. In addition, we paid particular attention to the business talk and discourses staff used to describe their experiences and understandings of learning at work and how such views affected their comments on role, identity and competence. We did not use any quantitative methods (e.g. surveys or questionnaires) or statistical analyses in the development of our case study. All names used are pseudonyms.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.