DIALOGUE SKILLS TRAINING
national institute of corrections 2012-13
NIC is a Government-funded agency that works to improve Corrections in the US. They could see the potential value of Dialogue, in the form that it was being delivered in the Virginia DOC, to other jurisdictions. Rather than being an externally designed reorganisation of some kind that would have to be rolled out, they could see that the Dialogue work engages directly with the immediate practical needs and opportunities, and calls on people to use their initiative to address those themselves. Dialogue provides the necessary skills for good engagement, communication and decision-making to do this. Prison Dialogue was developing the internal capacity of a set of Dialogue Practitioners to deliver these skills to staff in the Virginia DOC. NIC wanted to make the Dialogue work available to other jurisdictions, and offered a grant in support of that. The grant was used to enable Prison Dialogue to take the time to document the Dialogue Skills Training in a transportable format, to document protocols in support of the Dialogue Practitioner Development Programme and to speak at the American Correctional Association Congress in Washington DC in August 2013. Read More