The CCJ4C project has identified the most critical training areas to implement in a career guidance system. The goal is to match and support reforms of penal systems across Europe.
CCJ4C stands for European Career Counselling Guidelines for Staff Working in Criminal Correctional Justice System.
Despite the significant changes in the European criminal justice systems in the last two decades, sector practitioners often lack professional guidance supporting their career management.
Such reality calls for an innovative approach to criminal justice careers to match the cultural change in correctional settings across EU jurisdictions.
This is the need underlying the CCJ4C’s project. The initiative is developing a training platform for both officers and administrations that will also help to guide policy proposals. This platform will incorporate courses and training and is dedicated to correctional staff that wishes to develop their competencies and skills.
To this end, it’s necessary to find out to what extent there is an ideal approach to developing prison staff’s career management skills. Furthermore, it is crucial to identify the elements of this model that translate into a change in public policies.
Assessing needs before developing the CCJ4C training platform
Over the past few months, the project partnership has been collecting and developing a broad catalogue of career management skills in criminal justice, especially corrections (prisons and probation services). This process allowed for an in-depth understanding of correctional officers, as a project target group.
For this research, the project partners conducted workshops to ascertain how correctional staff would describe their job duties and tasks. The professionals detailed what specific knowledge, skills, attitudes, and tools are required to perform their tasks correctly.
The information developed in this phase systematised the learning and training situations, and the most effective methodologies among correctional staff. In addition, this knowledge also made it possible to understand the required skill set of career management.
The results have shown the most critical areas that the CCJ4C training platform should include. Some areas of particular interest are mental health, soft skills, terrorism, radicalisation, drug-related offences, and organised crime.
From this point on, the project will develop and incorporate the online platform to launch to the public in May 2022.
The CCJ4C consortium met on the 24th and 25th of January 2022 to discuss the project development and results, including the stakeholders’ analysis in CCJ careers. This is the fourth meeting since the start of the project.
CCJ4C project is led by CPIP – Centre for the Promotion of Lifelong Learning (Romania), in partnership with IPS_Innovative Prison Systems (Portugal), Timisoara Prison (Romania), Bremen Senate of Justice and Constitution (Germany), General Directorate of Prisons and Detention Houses (Turkey), General Workers’ Union (Malta), Baltic Institute of Technological Education (Lithuania), ICPA – International Corrections & Prisons Association (The Netherlands), York Associates (United Kingdom), and Bagreeva Consulting Services (Norway).
For more information on the CCJ4C project, please visit its website.