Healing Corrections: The Future of Imprisonment - Softcover

Innes, Chris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555538479 ISBN 13: 9781555538477

Publisher: Northeastern University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Unlike critics who see the organizational cultures of prisons, jails, and community correction agencies as a problem that needs to be fixed with simple-sounding reforms, Chris Innes argues instead that these types of organizational cultures are adaptive and a source of strength that can be used to genuinely transform them. He shows how operational priorities, including safety and security, become much more difficult to sustain when organizational cultures become fragmented into disconnected subcultures. To transform an organizational culture, he argues, this fragmentation must be “healed” by changing the patterns of communication that make up the day-to-day reality of an organization’s culture. Innes advocates an innovative approach based on the skills and practices of dialogue. He describes in detail how Dialogic Practice can be used to transform organizational cultures through an implementation process that begins with the leadership and cascades through the organization as an expanding circle, as staff are trained and become engaged in the process. Innes draws upon the research and policy literature in several fields, the contemporary national debate on the role of the justice system in American society, and his own experience during the last forty years in correctional research and policy, and in working directly with correctional agencies.This innovative approach to transforming organizational cultures will interest correctional decision makers; administrators, researchers, and graduate students in criminal justice; advocates; and others who manage mission-driven human services organizations.

About this title

About the Author:

CHRIS INNES is former chief of the Research and Information Services Division, National Institute of Corrections, Federal Bureau of Prisons, in Washington DC. He currently resides in Traverse City, Michigan.

Review:

“This book will be of considerable interest to correctional professionals, graduate students in criminal justice, and perhaps also to managers in other structured, hierarchical organizations. The scholarship is first rate, the style is down to earth and accessible to the general reader, and the case-study approach makes for interesting reading. To my knowledge there are no other books in the organizational change literature, none of which focus on corrections, comparable to it.”—Leo Carroll, professor of sociology, University of Rhode Island

About this edition

• Publisher: Northeastern University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1555538479
• ISBN 13: 9781555538477
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256