Washington Swift and Certain Sanctioning: 2018 Report to the Legislature

SAC was implemented to align with the elements of a risk-need-responsivity (RNR) case management model. RNR entails targeting interventions in proportion to supervised individual’s risk to re-offend (more intensive interventions for higher risk supervised individuals), focusing interventions on criminogenic need (needs specifically associated with re-offending), and using cognitive-behavioral approaches that are responsive to a supervised individual’s distinct learning style by accounting for such factors such as mental health or cognitive impairments. This required SAC be aligned with RNR as part of a new community supervision model focusing on cognitive-behavioral intervention and improving supervised individual’s motivation to engage, in part, through the use of SAC sanctions.
SAC also increased staff safety, in that the continuity of sanctions was an important aspect to ensure that persons under jurisdiction knew what to expect from staff, and similarly, that staff had a similar response to like behaviors which increased their safety.
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The Department continues to refine SAC, including aligning it with the more contemporary Swift, Certain and Fair (SCF) model. Basic principles of SCF are swiftness, certainty, proportionality and fairness. SAC aligns with the basic principles of SCF. Swiftness is achieved by the supervised individual’s immediate arrest and confinement. Certainty is achieved by a clearly defined response that is applied for all violations. Proportionality is achieved by not only the distinction between low and high-level violations, informing supervised individuals that some behaviors are more serious than others, but also by demarcating the sixth and subsequent low-level violation as requiring a high-level response to establish that continued violation behavior is considered serious. Fairness is achieved by the SAC orientation which makes the supervised individual aware of the rules and consequences and by a consistent response for a defined set of violations. However, there are several opportunities to enhance fairness in the SAC model because fairness was not an explicit focus during SAC implementation.