Another way that officers can approach a relationship with an offender is by really getting to know them. Trying to develop real emotional relationships in order to get these offenders to stay out of trouble can be a method possibly worth using. Brinson calls the officers who do this rehabilitation practitioners. According to Brinson she says that these people, “…act as a mediator between the offender, the community, and finding resolution. This approach encourages self-reform and reentrance into the community and spends time on motivational interviewing and treatment programs while still administering mandates. Skeem et al. (2007) adds that authoritative, demanding, inflexible, and belittling use of control by practitioners negatively affected…show more content… Per the article, “Recidivism of Offenders on Federal Community Supervision” by William Rhodes, the definition of recidivism is, “When an arrest occurred for a serious crime during the period of active supervision, we defined this as criminal recidivism, and we associated the date of the arrest as the date of recidivism. When an arrest occurred, it defined the outcome. That is, community supervision may have been revoked following an arrest for a serious crime” (Rhodes 27). So when a person commits a crime after being on active probation or parole, and then are sentenced to prison, they have recidivated. According to the Lifer Parolee Recidivism Report, in the year 2007 “After three years, 65 percent of determinately sentenced inmates are returned to prison” (LFPRR 7). This is a true problem because of all the people who are on parole or probation, 65 percent of them go back to prison. This goes back to how the relationship between officers and offenders is approached. Are these officers focusing on the punitive concept of punishment, or are they rehabilitation practitioners? The problem is that there are too many people who are going back to prison, and the relationship possibly has a lot to do with it. As mentioned in the introduction, relationships are so important to us, as humans, in terms of meeting social and behavioral needs. The idea that an officer is taking the time to really get to know this person can be the absolute difference in an offender wanting to reoffend, or wanting to better themselves, as a
