In Search of Strange Bedfellows

Shakespeare had this mischievous habit of speaking about strange bedfellows – apparently a habit the British have yet to lose, as recently noted when scanning the morning tabloids in the Gatwick departure lounge. Since this is a family newspaper of a sort, I need to explain my reference to bedfellows. This is a G-rated discussion of a need to examine existing, and if necessary develop new, alliances in order to re-gain the high ground in corrections.

Just before leaving for the desert of Abu Dhabi, I had spent a few days in the desert oasis of Phoenix along with other ACA revelers. The ACA has an enviable history of electing thoughtful, motivated presidents, and Gwen Chunn is no exception. Within moments of looking in on our Exemplary Practices Committee Sunday morning, I was pretty sure that status quo was not a Latin term that she understood. President Chunn had no hesitation in challenging us to seek examples of innovative and effective alliances that will raise the bar in exemplary correctional practice.

Earlier that overcast morning that saw 23,000 marathoners pass the convention site, I was sweating with David Bogart in the tiny hotel fitness center and learned that he is completing a definitive work for ACA on direct supervision. David was one of the first correctional administrators to embrace the cultural shift towards the integration of an inmate management and security philosophy with imaginative design responses in Philadelphia and, later, Arlington, Va.

Along with other early pioneers like David Parrish in Hillsborough County; Art Wallenstein in Bucks County; Larry Ard in Contra Costa County; Sam Saxton in Prince Georges County; and Mark Fitzgibbons in Beaufort County, David’s real success was not the physical structure that resulted (even though all of these examples were selected by the AIA as distinguished), but the patient construction of alliances that became advocates for and ultimately benefactors of the direct supervision concept of inmate management.

In President Chunn’s platform, she is challenging us to project beyond our daily routines and envision a correctional practice that is better connected, more aligned, less constrained by convenience and more inspired by possibilities. Truthfully, when was the last time you e-mailed anyone with nothing more than an idea, but one that required more than two people to agree?

As I listened to President Chunn speak of alliances, I sensed that she had chosen this word carefully. A popular theme of recent has been partnering. Conference planners, construction managers and square dance callers all make a noun into a verb. But alliances are different from partnerships. Alliances are unions formed by an agreement, while partnerships establish the conditions of shared interests. Alliances are formed to accomplish a particular goal while partnerships imply a long-term affiliation. Both are essential for exemplary practice.

Not being trained in the legal profession, I don’t want to split hairs on a word. Yet every correctional officer, case manager or treatment counselor knows that altering human behavior begins with a perception or vision of a desired outcome, and the challenge is aligning inmate needs with programs, services, and conditions that have the potential to successfully effect the change. Not a partnership, which implies a long term association, but an alliance that satisfies the mission then points the way toward the next step.

If nothing else, correcting is perpetual motion; always evolving; always realigning because that is the nature of human change. So our challenge is choosing the appropriate alliances that support where the grant administration, treatment program, design solution and release preparation may be at that time, recognizing that the next step in the process of change may require different alliances. With a lot of time in the rarified air of 35,000 feet, I decided to list alphabetically a few alliances that are necessary to deliver correctional services and environments:

Architects
Budget Analysts
Correctional Officers
Dieticians
Equipment Suppliers
Families of Inmates/Victims
Grandparents
Health Care Workers
Information Specialists
Judges
Knowledge Brokers
Law Enforcement Officers
Maintenance Engineers
Newspaper Reporters
Original Thinkers
Politicians
Quality Control Specialists
Religious Leaders
Substance Abuse Counselors
Training Specialists
Union Representatives
Volunteers
Wardens
X-Offenders
Youth Counselors
Zennists (a stretch!)

That’s only 26 and hardly starts to name all the alliances that are necessary just to begin the day in the correctional world. As correctional professionals, we have been charged from our particular discipline to examine these alliances; to “drill down” to the core of our mission; and to establish or improve those alliances that raise the standard of correcting from what is convenient to what is exemplary.

An unfortunate trend of the last few years has been to use a timid economy to eliminate the resources that support the mission of correcting, so from a convenience perspective we have been given a misleading reprieve. Although some alliances certainly require financial resources to consummate, most of those listed above require time, imagination, and communication. The lack of resources need should not mean the lack of energy.

Granted, some of the potential alliances are strange bedfellows, but every one of the professionals I mentioned earlier enlisted and enforced unusual alliances to effect the change that resulted. With diminished funding, we still have so much to do for the mentally ill, the youth, the aging, the dangerous and the disenfranchised that the traditional alliances are inadequate. My short list was confined by space and imagination and is intended only to remind us how important fostering alliances has become.

In the quest for sustainability, some alliances should become partnerships – lasting, nourished and enriched unions. These will become obvious with time and tests. But to return to Shakespeare in closing, “It is better to have loved (aligned) and lost than to have never loved (aligned) at all.”

Stephen A. Carter, AICP, is principal of Carter Goble Lee LLC in Columbia, S.C.