I had busily arresting offenders for about 16 years when it became obvious to me that I was making no headway in the ‘War on Crime’ or the ‘War on Drugs’ or whatever war I was currently fighting as a State Probation and Parole Officer. I had started my career with the Alameda County (California) Probation Department and, after about 4 years in an extremely urban setting I received word that I had been hired by the Oregon Department of Corrections. As a case carrying officer, it was made plan to me that my primary obligation was to protect the community. I viewed this as finding the maximum number of offenders committing the most egregious of violations and putting them behind bars for the greatest length of time I could squeeze out of the local judicial system.
As I mentioned, I had been engaged in this (pardon the pun) pursuit for about 14 years when it dawned on me that not only was I arresting and re-arresting the same offenders, I had now graduated to arresting their children who were turning 18 with alarming frequency. Something was wrong with this picture. My job was to protect the community but the results, quite simply, were not meeting my needs, over time. My solution was to turn up the heat on the offenders. I applied for, and was certified for, training to carry a Glock 9mm semi-automatic handgun. I asked for a female partner, a cage car, and enough mace to stun a horse. Still convinced that we weren’t enforcing the conditions of probation firmly enough my partner and I redouble our investigation and arrest efforts. In the year 1995 we arrested 95 felons…certainly more than most police officers and even more than some entire rural police departments.
I took it upon myself, after that year, to compare my results with other officers who took a different approach to their job. One officer, in particular was about to retire and had, for all practical purposes, left his offenders unsupervised for the better part of a year prior to his retirement. I told no one what I discovered. To my shock there was simply no statistical difference between doing everything I could think of and doing, essentially, nothing at all. This meant that those offenders who were leaving the probation system would leave it in spite of our best or worst efforts to supervise them.
Now the stress and pressure I’d felt for years in my job came crashing down on me to a degree that I’d never before experienced. I felt I’d invested too many years to leave this profession but I could find no good reason to remain. Certainly I could more than match the pay in the private sector but the stubborn streak in me wanted to solve this riddle.
I enrolled in seminars by Dr. Don Andrews, a pioneering Corrections researcher who taught that offenders ‘behave’ the way they think. He taught that, furthermore, efforts to ‘restructure’ offender’s thinking patterns only show success when the curriculum focuses on their habits, attitudes, and belief systems. This was all well and good. But I was a line-level, meat-and-potatoes sort of officer. How could I change not only what I’d been focusing on, but even the core of the message that I was sending offenders? I was stuck, to say the least. It didn’t help much when a fellow officer from across the state told me about Dr Stanton Samenow. Dr. Samenow had written extensively about ‘criminal thinking errors’ . The good doctor taught that offenders have a common world view which stresses that they, in fact, are the victims of the criminal justice system. They also believe that they are victims of their own substance abuse and that, if anyone really cared to know, no on was really hurt during the commission of their crime (or else they deserved to be hurt), and that everyone else also perceived the world in this way. To them this meant that cops, judges, and parole officers conducted themselves pretty much as they, the offender, did but that they never got caught due to ‘good luck’ or the corruption of the system.
I knew offenders were pretty messed up in their thinking but I never had seen it laid out just so. I began my personal experiments with my own caseload to see ‘what worked’ in reducing negative behavior. I began asking offenders if they were, truth be told, the victims in the situation that brought them to my office. The universal answer was a resounding ‘yes’. I asked them if most people drank at the rate they were drinking and were using drugs in the manner and amount that they were. Again, a resounding ‘yes’. What was really strange was that I saw, for the first time that I had never entered into a conversation with these people. I had spent most of my time warning, threatening, and reasoning with them. A light bulb went off in my mind about that time and I vowed forevermore to try and talk my offenders into ‘being good’.
About this time another fellow officer delivered a video tape to my office titled The Reality Model’. I put the tape in my desk, without looking at it, and proceeded to talk to my offenders in a way that would expose their messed up thinking and, thusly, lead them away from a life of crime. The only problem was that they continued to lie to me, continued to use drugs and continued to get arrested at the same rate as they did when I spent the bulk of my time chasing them around the countryside. This was another dead end. I had no way to initiate a dialogue with these people. Their thoughts about me and my principles on my own belief window didn’t allow for this. I simply could not engage them in a conversation without their hostility and suspicions rising up after the first two or three sentences out of my mouth.
Then one night I pulled the Reality Model video out of my desk and threw it in my briefcase to watch at home. I finally went to bed at 2am that evening. Somehow the people who had developed the Reality Model had managed to reduce every training I’d had at the police academy, in numerous other training sessions, and through my courses at the University to one side of one sheet of paper. The model allowed the offender to fully explain his world, express the logic behind his (criminal) actions and then enter into a truthful dialogue with those of us purporting to ‘help’ him.
Quite briefly, the model taught that we all have a belief window. This was not new information. This device had also been called the Jihari window, self-talk, or, if you prefer, the Freudian Id. These types of labels had never made sense to any offender I had ever worked with. However, using a cartoon-like visual image of TV screen wired to the back of our heads and permanently mounted in front of our faces gave an image that I could teach to offenders. The TV screen was a filter. This information was as old a Socrates but it was presented in a thoroughly modern manner. All I needed to do was allow offenders the opportunity to describe their ‘belief window’. As it turns out, this has made all the difference.
Addiction, too, was laid out in a non-medical model. Addiction was simply defined as compulsive behavior with short term benefits and long term destruction. At last I could compete with King Heroin and Mr. Jack Daniels. You see, it is virtually impossible to talk to a young man or woman about substances when it feels so darn good to use these substances. But everybody had an uncle, friend, or loved one who had been using one substance or another for 10 or 20 years. All I had to do was draw those stories out of the offenders, do a little ‘cognitive restructuring’ and prepare people for the treatment that they had originally been ordered to attend by the court or Parole Board.
I went back to work and asked the county to allow me to use an abandoned storefront to set up a place I was to call ‘Belief, Motivation, and Change’. I got some offenders who had been ordered to do community service and we set out to scrub that place from top to bottom. We put a sign on the window and then asked my fellow officers to send offenders that were in minor violation of their parole or probation to the ‘BMC’ rather than putting them in jail for the first offense. I must say that if I had not developed the reputation of a Parole Officer who operated just to the right of Attila the Hun, I would have been laughed out of my office. Nevertheless I set out on my grand experiment in marrying the Reality model to the criminal justice system.
The first group had, it seemed to me, primarily violated the conditions of their probation by using drugs. As they entered the BMC storefront promptly at 8am they were surly, sleepy, angry, and unemployed. Slowly I asked them what was wrong with the ‘system’ that placed them on probation. I asked them why people used drugs. I asked them why they found themselves, over and over again, in jails, hospital rooms, courtrooms, and funeral parlors. Little did I know that my own education was just beginning.
I have since offered programming to thousands of people across the United States and, just as Dr. Andrews predicted, I have discovered that this type of group…a mandated group of substance abusing offenders…most definitely has a common ‘group belief window’. In the arena of substance abuse the beliefs are that ‘everybody uses drugs’, ‘drugs help me cope with an unfair world’, and my personal favorite, ‘drugs are fun’.
One my first day in that storefront I introduced the first natural law of the Reality Model. “If the results of your behavior do not meet your needs, over time, there is an incorrect principle on your belief window”. Of course I had to explain what a belief window was and I had to listen to stories about how, in fact, drug and alcohol usage was getting them the results they wanted. But, you see, I had laid the groundwork by listening to their beliefs about the world. I had also taken the time to ask them what they wanted their lives to look like. I could then ask, in all sincerity, that if their behavior was getting them what they wanted, why were they so mad about having to attend the BMC because that was most certainly one thing that their drug use had gotten them? …Total silence
Now I began the process of cognitive restructuring. I was relaxed and non-confrontive because I was dealing only with the offender’s belief system, not my own belief system. Again and again they spoke to how drugs and alcohol were ‘fun’. I introduced the second Franklin natural law, ‘Results take time to measure’. We wrestled with this concept until the class came to the conclusion that happiness does not equal fun. I agreed that fun can be purchased at $9.00 per fifth or at $90.00 per gram. But what was the cost to their own desired results? Where was the nice house in a good neighborhood? Where was their money? Heck, where were their spouses and children? I now had their undivided attention. Over the course of the next 5 days (20 hours) we completed the Franklin model and many other exercises in growth, empathy, and addiction. We also freed up that many jail beds for more hard core offenders. But, best of all, the class was fascinated.
There were men and women in the first class. People of different races and ages as well. But the model spoke to each person individually. ‘Are you getting what you want from this life?’ If the answer is ‘yes’ why are you so mad? If the answer is ‘no’ then let’s proceed a little farther and see if you can use this tool to get the things you say you want. This was to be an exercise in total personal responsibility. There is no doubt in my mind that some class members were certain that they were ‘getting over’ on the system by not having to go to jail. I think one of the class members was hung over from the night before. But it didn’t matter. I was putting information out into the offender community that I was sure would slowly change the culture of that particular population.
After I had been delivering classes for nearly six months I started to have my fellow officers ask if they could ‘sit in’ to see what the program material was all about. They were reporting a new civility on the part of some of their most resistive clients. Then Alcohol and Drug counselors started asking to view the material because offenders were showing up in greater numbers and completing treatment in greater numbers. Soon every class I taught had a few ‘workers’ participating. And that was my only rule. Everyone was equal. There would be no ‘sitting in’. This information applied to us as staff at least as much as it applied to the offenders so the criterion was that all participants experienced all 20 hours.
I don’t believe in magic pills or instant change. But it was becoming undeniable that those offenders exposed to this material, based on the Franklin Model, began participating in, and completing, their programming in greater numbers than the ones who were just incarcerated. We were, at one level, just trying to help them answer the question ‘What’s in it for me’ to comply with the conditions of my probation? ‘What’s in it for me’ to complete alcohol and drug classes? (Hint: you’ll get off probation faster, no more urine tests, no more restitution payments, more money, and so on).
As the last seven years have unfolded I have received more requests to teach this model, this approach, than I can ever possibly honor. The model has infiltrated the State prison system, private drug and alcohol programs, and probation offices across the western United States. It does not operate in competition with any other approach to treatment in the mandated populations. It has been as effective with juveniles in a Job Corps setting as with hardened criminals in a prison setting. Do we still get conned? Yes. Are people still violating the conditions imposed by the courts? Again, yes. But the statistics have held firm. Offenders exposed to this approach have an overall better success rate than offenders who are never given this information. This protects my community. That was my original goal. I listened. I learned.