There’s something that continues to befuddle me in my still very small clinical world. I work primarily with individuals that have been convicted of having committed a sexual offense and I have many questions about why things are the way they are. The chart below shows a piece of my befuddlement related to offenders, employment, and compliance with mandated treatment.

There are quite a few factors I’m leaving out, of course. Generally speaking, I find it difficult to understand how we can demand compliance for treatment that they have to pay for, at the same time making it incredibly difficult for those with a felony – particularly those with a felony in for a sexual offense – to find gainful employment that would allow them to remain in compliance. There are many more roads leading to non-compliance which seems counter-productive to…well…everything. This crude chart doesn’t even begin to address the issues of counselor burn-out and lack of support for agencies that do this type of work. What exactly is the end-goal I wonder? Is it really to successfully reintegrate offenders back into communities and guide them towards being pro-social and productive members of society? The more I see this patterns in the system that lead away from this end-goal and lean towards failure, the deeper my befuddlement.

In my mind, a more useful chart might be something like this:

I’m interested in how other countries work with their offenders and treatment mandated populations on issues of reintegration. Next stop…Canada.

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