Program Goals/Target Population
Functional Family Parole (FFP) is a supervision program that incorporates family-focused, strengths-based principles of Functional Family Therapy (FFT). FFP was designed to provide a new model of parole for youths who were eligible to be pre-released or diverted from incarceration to community supervision. The goals of the FFP program are to reduce re-arrests and achieve gainful employment with greater earnings for participants. The program targets youths who have non-serious criminal convictions and are released into the custody of their families, a relative, or community group home.
Services Provided
FFP consists of an average of eight sessions delivered over approximately 6 months. The program is implemented by probation officers (POs), who carry a maximum caseload of 20 youths at a time. POs guide youths and their families through three phases: 1) Engage and Motivate; 2) Support and Monitor; and 3) Generalize. The program uses a supervised parole model that incorporates family-based intervention techniques, including engagement, motivation, relational assessment, behavior change, and generalization.
In the engage and motivate phase, therapists concentrate on establishing and maintaining a strengths-based relationship with clients. Elements of this phase include engaging the family, reducing early risk factors, setting expectations, developing a balanced alliance, establishing trust and credibility, decreasing hopelessness, understanding family challenges, and creating a motivational context for undertaking the change process and maintaining long-term change. During this phase, the development of three skill sets are emphasized: 1) structuring skills (which provide direction and focus during family meetings); 2) interpersonal skills (which include validating, positive interpretation, reattribution, reframing, and sequencing); and 3) relationship skills (which include trust, warmth, humor, non-blaming, and respect).
During the support and monitoring phase, therapists concentrate on the relationship process between adolescents and their families. The idea that a positive experience in therapy can lead to a lasting change is emphasized and reiterated. The goals of this phase include facilitating individual and relational change, developing support and intervention plans, knowing community resources, maintaining and using community contacts, locating resources that fit risks and needs, linking families to programs that fit their needs, eliminating barriers to services, supporting providers and families through monitoring and understanding, and fine-tuning family change. The skills emphasized during this phase are relational skills and structuring and organizing skills to identify, maintain, and help families use community contacts and resources.
During the generalization phase, the goals are to maintain individual and family change once the case is closed, to build additional skills consistent with the treatment, to apply changes to new obstacles as they come up, to incorporate relevant community resources, and to help maintain changes. Skills emphasized during this phase include structuring activities and identifying resources to maintain positive change and relapse prevention (Andrews et al. 2012).
Program Theory
The program is grounded in the FFT model, which focuses the family away from the youth’s problems and on to patterns of behavior between family members, with the aim of establishing more positive familial interaction patterns.
