‘Guys, get your guns out!’ – An autobiographical account of a US community corrections training academy
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/02645505211025591 |
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
‘Guys, get your guns out!’
– An autobiographical
account of a US
community corrections
training academy
Sean Blackwell
The College of Idaho, USA
Abstract
Thisarticleaddressescommunity corrections (CC) trainingfrom the perspective of a former
practitioner. Though CC training has received modest consideration, academies’ roles
in reinforcing occupational cultures are nearly absent from the literature. This article
addresses this gap with an autobiographical account of an academy experience and
shows that not only did the profession appear to attract candidates with public safety
orientations, but also that the academy reinforced those orientations through a dis-
proportionate focus on use of force and officer safety. The article considers challenges
policymakers and managers face when attempting to implement reform in public
safety cultures.
Keywords
probation training, community corrections officers, organisational cultures
Introduction
The fridge wobbled as I shifted my balance from one booted foot to another, poised
with bent knees and red plastic pistol pointed through the kitchen archway, waiting
for the next trainee group to enter the staged apartment and perform a safety sweep.
I stood on a kitchen appliance because, unlike most of my classmates, I’d already
Corresponding Author:
Sean Blackwell, Department of Anthropology & Sociology, The College of Idaho, 2112 Cleveland Blvd,
Caldwell, ID 83605, USA.
Email: sblackwell@collegeofidaho.edu
Probation Journal
ªThe Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/02645505211025591
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The Journal of Community and Criminal Justice
2021, Vol. 68(3) 330–346
been on the job for over six months and received relevant training from one of my
peer training officers. The shoulder squeeze from the second person in a stack,
urgent calls of ‘red zone!’, and the intricacies of ‘slicing the pie’ to clear blind
corners had already become a part of my verbal and physical vocabulary. I
had learned to be vigilant in search of symbolic assailants (Skolnick, 1966), yet
my time on the job also taught me to suspect that embodying and performing
violence probably had more to do with occupational acculturation and accep-
tance than abstract mortal dangers. Once my classmates entered the apartment,
one of them, a seasoned combat veteran, quickly walked into the kitchen,
looked around, and then carried on clearing the rest of the house with nary an
upward glance. As they made their way back to the door at the end of the
scenario, I called out and shared a laugh with my classmate as he cursed
himself and then expressed relief that he didn’t miss anyone during his old
soldiering days.
Like others who have been enmeshed in law enforcement practices (Kraska,
1998), I’d be lying if I said this sort of combat training and the attendant bonding
wasn’t fun. But throughout my journey, I had cause to pause and wonder about the
extent to which all of this was preparing me to help supervised individuals rebuild
their lives, conquer addictions, manage mental health symptoms, and avoid
prison, notwithstanding the near impossibility of such a task in the face of broader
neoliberal neglect (De Georgi, 2017). It was in those reflexive moments that
perching on a fridge to pretend-shoot my classmates shifted from feeling like a
reward for prior combat training to something a bit troubling. Research often
presents community corrections officers (CCO) as ‘street-level boundary spanners’
(Lutze, 2014) who ‘wear many hats’ and strike a balance between social work
and public safety; however, over an approximately 30-year period, this balance
increasingly favoured public safety because control, enforcement, and com-
pliance narratives invaded community corrections practice as part of an emerging
culture of control (Garland, 2001). Now that US departments have continued
shifting towards evidence-based supervision models, some have faced difficulty
adapting clinical practices to those now-entrenched control cultures (Taxman,
2013).
Though the conversation never really subsides, George Floyd and Breonna
Taylor’s recent deaths at the hands of US police officers have reinvigorated criminal
justice reform (and abolition) debates. Amid these debates, we must remember
community corrections’ place in criminal justice systems and call out the roles its
actors play in structuring and navigating probation and parole processes. While
police training continues to command substantial scholarly and activist attention
(Antrobus et al., 2019; McLean et al., 2020; Wolfe et al., 2019 are recent
examples), CCO training remains understudied; additionally, CCO induction and
academy experiences, in stark contrast to explorations of professional values
(Annison et al., 2008), practices (DeMichele and Payne, 2018; Taxman, 2013),
and political-economic currents (Vanstone and Priestley, 2016), have received
almost no academic consideration. Harker and Worrall (2011) make brief mention
of a three-month Western Australian probation training academy in their overview
331
Blackwell
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