Criminal justice policy inside-out: An initial case study in education among police and incarcerated men
| Author | Elaine Frantz,Jesse Wozniak,Norman Conti,Adam Burston |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032258X19860421 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Criminal justice policy
inside-out: An initial case
study in education among
police and incarcerated men
Norman Conti
Duquesne University McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal
Arts, Pennsylvania, USA
Adam Burston
University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, USA
Jesse Wozniak
West Virginia University Eberly College of Arts and Sciences,
West Virginia, USA
Elaine Frantz
Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA
Abstract
This project discusses the development and implementation of a three-credit
graduate/undergraduate course, offered to police officers and incarcerated men,
that would eventually become part of the city’s recruit training academy. The initial
class consisted of six veteran officers and six men serving life sentences. The pro-
gramme has the potential to integrate the fundamentals of restorative justice within
the occupational culture of policing in order to produce direct benefits for public
safety and may also be effective for building more authentic relationships between
police and communities of colour. The article explains what went into creating this
class, how it progressed and what resulted.
Corresponding author:
Norman Conti, Duquesne University McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts, 600 Forbes
Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 15219-3016, USA.
Email: normanconti@gmail.com
The Police Journal:
Theory, Practice and Principles
2020, Vol. 93(3) 248–264
ªThe Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0032258X19860421
journals.sagepub.com/home/pjx
Keywords
Destigmatisation, socialisation, prison, race, restorative justice, training
Introduction
From 2009 through 2016, our group – the Elsinore Bennu Think Tank for Restora-
tive Justice – devoted considerable effort to developing, negotiating and funding an
ancillary curriculum for police academy training that we believed would help
improve the professional socialisation of police officers by lessening the transmis-
sion of outdated notions within their occupational culture. Specifically, we have
worked to synthesises the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program (Pompa, 2013;
Werts, 2013) with police academy training. Inside-Out is andragogy developed by
Pompa (2004) in which university students and incarcerated people take university
courses inside of correctional facilities to foster collaboration, reduce stigma and
prisoner recidivism. Our initiative is a dynamic partnership between the Pittsburgh
Bureau of Police, Duquesne University and the Pennsylvania Department of Correc-
tions that brings police recruits together with incarcerated men to study as peers in a
seminar behind prison walls. The seminar is an academic course, meeting once a
week, where ‘outside’ students (i.e., police officers and/or recruits) and an equal
number of ‘inside’ students (i.e., incarcerated men) attend class together inside of a
prison. We believe that the addition of an innovative experiential learning curricu-
lum to traditional academy training provides recruits with an opportunity to develop
a more nuanced professional vision during their initial socialisation. For the incar-
cerated men, their coursework holds the secondary benefit of empowering them to
see the humanity in a group of people (i.e., the police), whom up to that point they
had recognised only as adversaries.
Police Training Inside-Out (hereafter PTI-O) is a response to the widely accepted
finding that traditional training methods are failing new officers and their depart-
ments (Buerger, 1998; Conti, 2009; Fielding, 1988; Harris, 1973; Lundman, 1980).
There is a consensus among scholars that traditional training promotes the type of us
vs. them mentality that undermines even the best efforts of law enforcement within
the communities they serve. Training environments that apply pressure to recruits
for the sole purpose of generating a response to that pressure (i.e., high stress
paramilitary academies), socialise recruits into maladaptive coping strategies (Conti,
2009, 2011; Violante, 1993; Wozniak, 2017). While extreme harassment, debase-
ment, isolation, and a loss of identity are supposed to re-socialise the recruit into a
disciplined officer they lack any educational value whatsoever (Shernock, 1998).
Moreover, paramilitary stress academies produce defensive and depersonalised offi-
cers while collegiate non-stress training models, a small minority in American
policing, have no such consequences (Lundman, 1980). Additionally, depersonalised
teaching models undermine cohesion among police officers of different racial back-
grounds (Conti and Doreian 2011, 2014). Furthermore, the stress model can result in
unquestioning obedience to superiors, increased hostility and low self-esteem
(McCreedy, 1980).
Conti et al. 249
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