This Professional Certificate will enable learners to:

• Appreciate the sociological rationale for punishment, and how the use of imprisonment as a penal strategy serves to deter, reform, and reintegrate the offender into society. This is accompanied by the development of skill-sets and knowledge-base of practitioners in the criminal justice system and related social control institutions, juvenile institutions, family service centres, to craft policies and programmes that will serve to prevent and deter crime, and rehabilitate and reintegrate offenders.
• Examine their relationship with their own cultural heritage and how this contributes to unconscious biases and stereotypes, as well as their effects on helping relationships. This is done through the navigation of personal level and structural level constructs to acknowledge diversity, respect differences, and recognise injustice or power dynamics to be able to break down cross cultural barriers that impede the development of effective helping relationships in the corrections setting. Participants would then be able to build rapport with service users in the corrections setting, understand the needs of different service users’ personal situations, communicate genuine concern, and empower service users through their interactions.
• Understand the larger socio-legal and ethical issues behind decision making, and increase their ethical sensitivity in the corrections setting by being able to critically identify and analyse ethical dilemmas, as well as to justify their views by applying the relevant ethical principles, laws, policies or frameworks in their everyday work with relevant stakeholders in the corrections setting.
• Use different evidence-based therapy approaches to formulate challenging cases in their line of work; to work confidently in their casework with clients and exercise flexibility in using different types of interventions. They will be familiar with different ways of formulating cases and identifying targets for intervention.
• Apply the basics of reflective practice, which allows them to safely explore and process the difficult emotions and situations encountered in corrections work, so to increase their self-confidence and reduce the feeling of burn-out when engaging in corrections work. Outcomes will be measured using The Consultation Questionnaire (Knauer et al., 2017) and the Reflective Practice Questionnaire (Rogers et al., 2019).