…we are prison practitioners. We are not researchers, economists, clinicians, psychologists, or academics.
Between us, we have spent decades working inside and around prisons. We have worked with inmates, wardens, correctional staff, volunteers, community organizations, and people trying to understand why some individuals change and others do not.
Those experiences have left us with questions. Two of those questions led to the hypotheses behind Root-Cause Rehabilitation.
We believe they are worth investigating. We do not know if they are true. That distinction matters to us.
Our experiences have shaped what we see when we look at prisons and rehabilitation. They have also created biases. Years of seeing something work can make it easy to believe we understand why it worked. We may not. That is one reason we are interested in hearing from people who see this differently than we do.
Researchers may see questions we have not asked. Correctional leaders may see operational realities we have overlooked. Clinicians and trauma specialists may see risks we do not understand. Economists may ask whether an idea that sounds worthwhile actually produces enough benefit to justify its cost. Inmates and former inmates may see the entire subject from a place we never can.
We need those perspectives. Meanwhile, we will continue doing what practitioners sometimes do. Think. Write. Create. Ask questions. Develop content. Put ideas into forms that allow other people to examine them.
The Kronos Project novel, The Kronos Project Facilitator Guide, Choices, and Prison Reads are part of that process. None proves Root-Cause Rehabilitation works. They simply move the thinking a little farther downstream.
Perhaps you see something in our hypotheses that we do not. Perhaps you know research we should be reading. A question we should be asking. A risk we have missed. A better way to test what we think we have observed.
Perhaps you simply disagree. That’s useful, too. We are not trying to prove ourselves right. We are trying to find out what is true.
So, wonder with us!