We are too familiar with the scene: a person is arrested, brought to court, found guilty and sentenced to jail or prison; after serving a sentence for the crime, that person is released back into society and is once again arrested, brought to court, and sentenced back to jail or prison. We have a name for this process: recidivism, and correction officials in Blackford County knew something had to be done.
They set out to shut this revolving door through a program called Thinking for a Change. For purposes of their study they defined recidivism as “an individual who, within a three year period, commits additional criminal acts similar in nature to the originating offense within Blackford County and the contiguous counties of Jay, Grant, Wells and Delaware.” They sampled 100 random cases in order to establish a baseline of recidivism in Blackford County. The baseline was compared to the statistics of 55 individuals who were ordered to participate in the Thinking for a Change Program. An additional 55 individuals were chosen who were not required to participate in the program. The results of this study were quite dramatic.
They found that prior to the implementation of the program and based on the study of the 100 randomly sampled individuals, within a period of just 1 year, 21.5% of those individuals had committed a new criminal offense of a like kind to their original offense, and 32.25% had done so within 3 years. After the implementation of the Thinking for a Change Program, the recidivism rate dropped within the 1 year period from 21.5% to just 5.45%, and for those committing a similar crime within 3 years it had dropped from 32.25% to just 9.1%. Overall, the recidivism rate for the 1 and 3 year samples had been reduced by almost 75%, a remarkable achievement. Blackford Superior Court Judge John W. Forcum said: “This not only reflects on the effectiveness of the programs in general but also on the hard work and professionalism of the Community Corrections and Probation staff. You can have the best programs available but if you don’t have the personnel to support them, they will not be effective.”
The Blackford County Probation Department and the Blackford County Community Corrections Department began collaborating on case management of adult offenders in 2003. Together they wanted to learn more about the root problems of repeat offenders and identify methods that might reduce the long standing and sometimes too acceptable rates of recidivism. They discovered that while each of their departments separately dealt with Court-referred adult clients, often their agendas and results in similar areas were conflicting and deficient.
These two departments began the process of combining their strategies and working in a cohesive system of rehabilitation. They began with two simple assumptions: 1) every client/offender is unique, and 2) the traditional and classic methods of relating risk to recidivism may be neither productive nor cost effective. They collectively began a slow and deliberate process of identifying individualized needs and placing those people in the best available programs. With guidance from the Indiana Department of Correction, and utilizing experts with knowledge in the field, both departments began exploring Evidence Based Programs and the methods used to identify the needs and risks associated with recidivism. Evidence Based Programs are those supported by sound scientific documentation as to their effectiveness and proven success.
Aaron Henderson, Chief Probation Officer, and Deb Perry, Director of Community Corrections for Blackford County, worked together to change the face of local corrections programs. They shared a belief that for too long the local jails and the Indiana Department of Correction have simply been revolving doors of justice with the shared expectation that offenders will return. They decided that if this door was to be shut then changes had to be made at the grassroots level.
Both Henderson and Perry began by encouraging every supervising officer to deal with each client as an individual and not as a statistic. Too often the tendency was to think of and classify these clients in terms of their risks rather than as people. It is much easier to classify people according to their risk of future behavior rather than to find solutions to their individualized, and sometimes complicated, problems. The officials in Blackford County implemented the Thinking for a Change Program and adapted their policies and procedures to focus attention on the individual needs of their clients.
They utilized the Level of Service Inventory–Revised (LSI-R), which is an acceptable method of identifying client risk and behavior and the specific areas that need to be addressed. A treatment program could be utilized to address one or more of the underlying social deficiencies that are present in a majority of adult offenders. Through the early stages of the program implementation, it became obvious that each client/offender was looking differently at his/her own life and situation. The probation and community corrections officers were also looking differently at the clients. The pieces of the recidivism puzzle were starting to come together in East Central Indiana.
The study is ongoing but these initial results are proof to Blackford County that the program does work and additional programs and opportunities for adult offenders should continue to be developed. Indiana correctional professionals have generally been slow to embrace evidence based programs, but they are very enthusiastic about the results of this program.