Social Worker Competency

To help people, social workers must have certain competencies. One would be to apply critical thinking to inform and communicate professional judgements. This means that there is to be a fair treatment of people in prisons. As well as the need to develop critical thinking questions to encourage thought about what kind of health care a prisoner will be provided. This will assure that people are treated with dignity and fairness. Another competency, is to gain sufficient awareness to eliminate the influence of personal biases and values in working with diverse groups. Practitioners need to develop self-awareness regarding any prejudices and stereotypes. If they can do this than prisoners can be treated fairly under no bias and will …show more content…
Social workers need to know what type of assistance to offer to one of their clients. If they do not have this kind of knowledge then it could result in a negative effect for the client. Such as not getting the help that they need and deserve. Also, social workers need to be unbiased. This a crucial part of their job. Many times they will be working with someone who is vastly different from them. If they hold certain biases or stereotypes against a client then it could interfere with their work. Clients could end up not getting what they need because the social worker thinks of them differently as any other client. Social workers need to be able to select the appropriate intervention strategies. If they were to be working on a domestic violence case then they need to know how to develop a mutually agreed on intervention goals based on what the client wants to do. Also, they need to be able to analyze situations presented to them. This goes along with them being able to accurately know what assistance a client would need based on what the social worker can …show more content…
They came to the agreement that social workers should work for an increased use of alternatives to incarceration. Doing this will replace a reliance of certain institutions with the treatment of convicted offenders. There was also a push to completely remove large-scale juvenile institutes. There should not even be any large-scale institutes for adults. There was a large emphasis on the need for sound community treatment programs for most offenders. Under the Reagan administration, there was a shift in criminal justice philosophy. It went from being a more rehabilitative approach to being a more punitive one. At the same time, the social work profession moved away from criminal justice, even though social justice remained a priority in all fields. There was seen to be a lack in effective skills and rehabilitative treatment techniques for offenders. This began to bring tensions between the philosophies of social work and corrections. It was believed to come from a lack of training for work in a criminal justice setting.

Veterans in the Criminal Justice