Correctional Interventions and Programs - Essay Example

Victim awareness, monetary penalties, and juvenile supervision interventions are rating poorly on their effectiveness (MacKenzie, 2006). Guts feelings help inform decisions about many things in life and experience helps sharpen gut feelings. The experience of community correctional officials enables them to infer about the effectiveness of certain aspects of correctional programs. Even so, there are elements about correctional programs that gut feelings cannot capture accurately and that need the input of research.

Research provides scientific ways of testing the effectiveness and flaws of a correctional program (Craig et. al., 2013). An added advantage with research is that the findings can be replicated to test for their reliability, something that is difficult with gut feelings. The research uses empirical ways of generating knowledge whereas gut feelings use intuition. Overall, both research and gut feelings are important and community correctional officials should combine them in assessing the effectiveness of a program (White et. al., 2008).

The inputs of the two should complement each other.