A Revamped Juvenile Justice Training Academy: How Onboarding Evaluations can Shape Considerations for Ways Forward

• In Event: Correctional Officer Training: Experience, Evaluation, and International Perspectives

Abstract

Most recently, Texas Juvenile Justice Department revamped the New Hire Training Academy. Currently, instead of doing all the training prior to engaging in the occupational role on campus, recruits now do 240 hours “up front” at the Academy, then train on prison campuses on the units/in the dorms, but return to the Academy at the 60-day point for 30 additional hours of training and again at the 180-day mark. Based on a survey of how recruits experience 1) the academy and 2) their first 60 days under the employ of TJJD (i.e., their onboarding into the prison campus) we present findings tied to how participants feel about their training and how effective the training is, in its new form, for their correctional work once on the frontline. The emphasis here is on what youth security officers require in their training to feel they can optimally perform their occupational responsibilities, the types of training (i.e., role plays, classroom learning, in dorm experience) that best reinforce occupational expectations and provide overall insight into the job requirements. We speak to the benefits of on campus training and how such helps recruits to retain material taught because they have a prison context in which they can now apply their lessons too (rather than their imagination about what youth closed custody is “like” in Texas). Further, we speak to the slow process of overhauling the academy that is underway and how the training team has navigated employee resistant to change. We speak to the challenges of adult learning pedagogy and how that impacts retention too.

Authors

• Christopher Elliston, Texas Juvenile Justice Department

• Rosemary Ricciardelli, Memorial University of Newfoundland