Behavior management plans

The processes in behavior management include many strategies and methods found in sound cognitive-behavioral clinical practice. Broadly speaking, we define behavior management as the point of interaction between staff and inmate patients within the facility (or any other location in which they work together). It is always occurring, although not always planful or well-executed. A behavior management plan (BMP) takes into consideration staff abilities, specific characteristics of the unit, and the capacity of the patient for whom the plan is developed. A well-constructed BMP specifies who will do what, for whom, and in what contexts. Behavior management plans are most often developed and implemented for behaviors that pose high risk to inmate or staff health within the facility, or high risk to disrupt the safety and programming within the facility. We distinguish ‘behavior management’, which we define as a series of interventions designed to reduce behaviors which destabilize unit or facility functioning, from ‘treatment.’ Treatment is viewed as a series of interventions designed to reduce the future frequency, intensity and/or severity of a given behavior in the unit and upon return to the community. Thus, while there may be treatment characteristics included in BMPs, the scope of the intervention is typically more limited. A BMP may focus on a particular disruptive behavior in the unit, for instance, without any consideration of whether the behavior may occur in the community following release. In this chapter we review concepts related to behavior management and the creation of behavior management plans.