The Accountability Project

The Accountability Project is designed to bring incarcerated offenders to an understanding of the impacts of crime upon victims, and to enable a more real and personal sense of accountability.

The Accountability Project is designed to bring incarcerated offenders to an understanding of the impacts of crime upon victims, and to enable a more real and personal sense of accountability. This is a notion not easily absorbed by those who are unused to taking responsibility for their actions and impulses, or who tend to blame others for what they themselves have done. It requires a level of honesty and self-reflection that does not come easily to many offenders, nor is it generally well supported by many inmates in the prison population. But personal accountability can help offenders transform denial and minimization into a commitment to integrity and honest intention by facing the past and re-framing the future.

Personal accountability requires first and foremost the courage and the capacity to more fully comprehend the effects – the truth and consequences – of one’s actions and behaviors upon one’s victims and their survivors. It also requires a willingness and ability to dismantle the wall of minimization, denial, and disassociation that exists within many offenders. These are both very difficult challenges for offenders, but they are not insurmountable. What is required is an understanding of some of the reasons offenders allow themselves to make the choices they do to victimize others, and a willingness to make a rigorous commitment to personal accountability in the long-term aftermath of these crimes and violations. This is not a simple challenge, but it is a worthy endeavor.  And it can begin even several decades after the crime.

An initiative rooted in affectively-oriented awareness-building, the Accountability Project embraces a dual approach to accountability. First, it can provide a means for victims/survivors of violence and violation to express their feelings toward the incarcerated offenders in their cases. This is handled through a victim-centered offender liaison, enabling victims/survivors to express anything from continuing anger and pain to a request that the offender begin doing something to make meaning from what he or she did, all those years ago. Second, through an offender education curriculum, it can provide an approach that is both cognitive and experiential in nature – and both inwardly and outwardly focused.

Giving victims/survivors an opportunity to express their feelings toward the offender in their cases provides each offender with a reminder that the consequences of his or her behaviors continue, even many decades after the crime was committed. In education, the Accountability Curriculum focuses on what one has done, thereby supplementing the “changing one’s thinking” curricula that are found in the more effective and traditional cognitive intervention/change programs. The evidence clearly suggests that these programs are invaluable, but the fundamental operating principle at work in the Accountability Project is that offenders cannot easily or fully move forward into the future without properly addressing (in an affective manner) the harms and violations they have committed against their victims in the past.

The hope and promise of the Accountability Project is that it will give victims/survivors a safe and reasonably simple way to give voice to their feelings, through a liaison, directly to the offender. The hope and promise of the Accountability Curriculum is that it can help offenders transform habits of denial and minimization into a deep commitment to integrity and honest intention by facing the past and re-framing the future. It is the creation of firm foundations through shoring up – but not ignoring or avoiding – the crumbled foundations of past actions and behaviors.

For further information on the developing Accountability Project, contact Jon Wilson.