Promoting enabling environments in custodial settings

Chelsea Troutman is a Board-Certified Behaviour Analyst and Clinical Supervisor, and Director of a Behaviour Support Practice Elements ABC.

Chelsea has extensive experience working within Government and Community Service Sectors with expertise in disability services, children and family services, out of home care, and forensic disability. 

She presented at the Complex Needs Conference last year on the topic Promoting 'enabling environments' in restrictive settings to progress treatment and meaningful outcomes for all. 

 Enabling environments are defined as "places where good relationships are upheld and facilitate well-being for all participants, staff and service users alike, and where new ways of relating can be learned through mutual respect and recognition, nurturing a sense of belonging". 

Karenza Louis-Smith spoke with Chelsea after the presentation and the pair spoke more about this, particularly in the context of custodial settings, like prisons and youth justice centres - and why it is so important.

More info:

• Hear from Chelsea about Elements ABC's approach
• enabling environments (ee) resources Royal College of Psychiatrists (UK)
•  Architectures of Harm or Architectures of Hope? - The effects of carceral space on the wellbeing of prisoners 

ermha365 provides mental health and disability support for people in Victoria and the Northern Territory. Find out more about our services at our website.

Helplines (Australia):
Lifeline  13 11 14
QLIFE 1800 184 527
13 YARN 13 92 76
Suicide Callback Service 1300 659 467

ermha365 acknowledges that our work in the community takes place on the Traditional Lands of many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples and therefore respectfully recognise their Elders, past and present, and the ongoing Custodianship of the Land and Water by all Members of these Communities.

We recognise people with lived experience who contribute to GET REAL podcast, and those who love, support and care for them. We recognise their strength, courage and unique perspective as a vital contribution so that we can learn, grow and achieve better outcomes together.

Transcript

Acknowledgement And Welcome

Speaker 4 0:00

Get Real is recorded on the unceded lands of the Boonerong and Warunjury peoples of the Kulan Nation. We acknowledge and pay our respects to their elders, past and present. We also acknowledge that the first peoples of Australia are the first storytellers, the first artists, and the first creators of culture, and we celebrate their enduring connections to country, knowledge, and stories.

Speaker 3 0:28

Welcome to Get Real, Talking Mental Health and Disability. Brought to you by the team at Erma 365.

Speaker 0:34

Join our hosts Emily Webb and Karenza Louis Smith as we have frank and fearless conversations with special guests about all things mental health and complexity.

Speaker 6 0:48

We recognise people with lived experience of mental ill health and disability, as well as their families and carers. We recognise their strength, courage, and unique perspective as a vital contribution to this podcast so we can learn, grow and achieve better outcomes together.

Meet Chelsea And Her Practice

Emily Webb 1:12

Chelsea Troutman is a board-certified behaviour analyst and clinical supervisor, and she's also director of a behaviour support practice, Elements ABC. She presented at the Complex Needs Conference last year on the topic promoting enabling environments in restrictive settings to progress treatment and meaningful outcomes for all. Enabling environments are defined as places where good relationships are upheld and they facilitate well-being for all participants, staff and service users alike, and where new ways of relating can be learned through mutual respect and recognition, nurturing a sense of belonging. This definition comes from the United Kingdom's Guide to Psychologically Informed Planned Environments, and it's co-authored by the National Offender Management Service and Department of Health. Kerenza Louis Smith caught up with Chelsea after the presentation, and the pair spoke more about this, particularly in the context of custodial settings like prisons and youth justice centres, and why it is so important. Here's

Speaker 5 2:25

Kerenza and Chelsea.

Karenza Louis-Smith 2:27

So we're live at the 2025 Complex Needs Conference, and I'm joined by Chelsea Trampman, who has just presented the context of environments in shaping behavior and rehabilitation. So, Chelsea, tell us a bit about you, you know, what you do, your work in this field.

Speaker 2 2:45

So I'm a behavior analyst, and I say that purely because I love the science of behavior. I love everything about behavior and I love people and relationships and everything that impacts behavior because we're just humans. We're all just humans. So I'm asked to go into a situation and try to manage behavior, teach new behaviors, shape new behaviors, manage high-risk scenarios, manage high-risk behaviors. But at the end of the day, I'm just really going in and working with the person and trying to figure out their purpose in life, how they have a sense of meaning in their life. And so my job is a behavior support practitioner. That's what I do. I'm a behavior analyst, so I love data. I love understanding patterns and behavior. But I think what's really important is I understand the patterns within an environment that either trigger the occurrence or non-occurrence of behavior. So effectively, we can invoke stress in someone, or we can create an environment where they thrive. And you see it a lot in classrooms. For example, you see it a lot with young students, and you see an environment where the teacher just loves them and engages with them and they feel a sense of belonging and they thrive. They have the best year. And then they go to another teacher who doesn't make any connection with them, who doesn't pay attention to their needs, who kind of disregards what they do need, and then they they struggle, right? So my job is to go in and essentially understand behavior within the context of the environment and understand the behavior with what the person needs and essentially what's meaningful to them.

Speaker 1 4:11

So who do you work with then, Chelsea?

Speaker 2 4:13

I own a practice and we we work across the community and across various settings. I personally have always worked with high-risk youth and forensic disabilities. So more in secure settings, custodial environments, some schools, but it's mostly when they're excluded from schools or they're struggling to engage with schools. I've always worked in that environment.

Risk Management Versus Rehabilitation

Speaker 7 4:33

And so tell us a bit about your presentation today. So the context of environments and shaping behavior. So different environments, especially in high-risk settings, like a jail, for example.

Skills Lost In Custody And Reentry

Speaker 2 4:45

So corrections by nature is it's about managing risk, right? So we know it's about managing risk, but the name corrections speaks to correcting behavior. It speaks to this idea of rehabilitation. But prison is such a tricky space because by nature you remove all identity, you remove the client's opportunity to make choices, self-direction, routines. You take away these primary skills, and clients become quite institutionalized in this environment. And so what happens is they're meant to comply and align to this risk management approach. And my presentation spoke to the pendulum of moving when it's solely focused on management, the risk is you have no focus on treatment. And in a really compliance-driven environment where you remove all of these skills and opportunities to practice a skill, the skills regress. But if you think about offense management when they go into the community, what do we need? We need to be able to problem solve. We need conflict resolution. We need to feel confident in how to set up a routine for the day. We need to have self-initiation and we need to know we have something meaningful to do that day. We need to have a sense of purpose. We need to have relationships. And relationships are tricky because we need to make sure that our family, our protective factors, our key people in our life want to come into the environment and see me. And if the environment doesn't set up a therapeutic space where they feel safe, the actual relationships, the family coming in, if they don't feel safe enough to come in, there's a poor quality engagement, right? So it can rupture those relationships. So everything I spoke about was how do we actually look at the environment to actually create a rehabilitative culture? And this is not just around opportunities for skill development. This is around looking at the environment. And as a culture, how are we promoting rehabilitation? So how are we actually protecting our staff to show up every day and say, you belong here, I have a sense of hope. I'm gonna look after you. We're on the same team. And when I say staff, I don't just mean the custodial staff or the clinical staff. I mean the janitor and the admin staff. So when families come to the front, someone's smiling at them and saying, You're welcome here. You belong here. We're gonna help you stay connected to your family member. You have the janitor who says, I know this is a really important place. I'm gonna make sure it's safe and clean for everyone. So a lot of what I spoke about was looking at these environments that naturally restrict individuals, focus primarily on management, remove opportunities for skill development, and also potentially increase risk because they're re-traumatizing. Whereas if we flip the switch, we flip it on its head, we create an environment that's quite enabling, we're more likely to actually give opportunities to practice the skills. We're actually giving staff the opportunity to feel this empowering agency, and then they're more likely to give this sense of hope to the client. So everyone's working on the same team. And it's really about that culture of rehabilitation. We're trying to move more towards everyone's equal. Staff, the participant, everyone. We talk a lot about person-centered practice, and it's all about the client. Obviously, I'm focused on the client, but you can't actually facilitate access to skill development. You can't facilitate access to opportunities for rehabilitation or treatment programs unless the people delivering them know why they're there. They feel a sense of value to be there. They're empowered to actually provide the sense of hope and optimism for the person. And unless they show up with that mentality, and unless the environment facilitates that for the staff, you run a risk of it just what I call treatment paralysis or really a focus on management more than treatment. And essentially what happens is clients leave prison, go into the community, are missing those prerequisite skills, and they're missing the actual foundational features that actually facilitate the rehabilitation or offense management.

Karenza Louis-Smith 8:36

So the community often says, well, hang on a minute, you've done bad things, lock you up, save your time, that's gonna fix you. You know, we're gonna we're gonna lock you away for eight years, ten years, and suddenly you're magically gonna change overnight and you're gonna come out in the community and that's all gonna be sorted. And I'm that that doesn't work, right?

Chelsea Troutman 8:52

No, it doesn't, because so you say they're in prison for five years, and during those five years, they've lost all those basic skills to function in daily life, to function in the community. So our expectation is they're naturally just gonna get those skills back. No, they're terrified. I had a client tell me one time, he had come out, he was out for a week, he sent me a message and just said, I can't do this anymore, it's really hard. And I said, What's going on? And he said, It's just really noisy out here. And he said, and I have no idea how to make my breakfast. And I'm like, that's quite important, right? And this was in context of a number of things. I didn't know who was coming to see me that day. I don't feel like I can get up and I'm used to just this routine. And he really just wanted to go back to his routine. But it's really important to think if you do not practice your skills every day, and if you are not promoted to practice and you're not empowered to focus on hope for a better future, and if you can't see opportunities to actually practice this, the thing is opportunities to practice leads to opportunities to feel successful, and then you see the possibilities. Then you see hope and you can see a path forward. And if you don't have that opportunity to practice, it's really hard to move forward. So entering the community, it's really terrifying. And we can't expect people to use skills that we haven't practiced.

Karenza Louis-Smith 10:11

We've taken away. Yeah, we have. It was when you were kind of locked up, I guess, even something like in five years, like you know, Myki might have been introduced.

Chelsea Troutman 10:18

That's right. Your phone. But it's even just basic problem solving. We miss those prerequisite skill sets that are required for offense management. So problem solving. Who are my safe people that I can still contact when I'm not doing okay? Or even just when I need to say hello to someone to know I'm not alone. All this basic conflict resolution, I'm gonna walk out and I'm gonna feel quite judged in the community because I've been inside the last period of time.

Karenza Louis-Smith 10:45

Yeah.

Chelsea Troutman 10:45

How do I manage that?

Speaker 7 10:47

So rehabilitation's important then, isn't it? It's about actually supporting people so that things do change.

Chelsea Troutman 10:54

Rehabilitation, I find I look at behavior change as two things, habilitation and rehabilitation. And habilitation is effectively teaching all the functional skills that promote someone's independence. Those are really, really important to practice across different contexts and settings, particularly in prison or custodial environments and the community. Rehabilitation speaks to reframing behaviors to make the offending behavior unnecessary. So it's two parts to it. If we neglect one, it means we're solely focused on the reframing of the offending behavior, but we forget they need to live a quality life. They need to have purpose and meaning. So if they don't have the skills to function in the community, they're more likely to default to old patterns that actually promote the offending behavior.

Karenza Louis-Smith 11:42

So we're not, I mean, obviously, we're talking a lot about complexity at the Complex Needs Conference. And then when I think about complexity, I think a lot about things like trauma, things that have happened to people as well. How do we manage then environments that you know help individuals feel safe and supported when you know you've had such a history of trauma?

Trauma, Safety, And Behaviour

Chelsea Troutman 12:02

That often leads to distrust, doesn't it? So they have a learning history where people have let me down, it's me against the world. I'm gonna engage in behavior that's most likely driven by fear, but it presents as avoidance in a custodial environment, it presents as protesting or oppositional. It can present as patterns in personality and attachment styles, and it can lead to really high-risk behavior effectively. So when someone doesn't feel safe, you're more likely to experience these high-risk behaviors, quite impulsive, reactive behaviors. And if we don't set up the environment where someone feels safe, then it actually impacts the staff's safety, it impacts the person's safety and they stagnate. So we need to think about trauma in the context of not just how it impacts the immediate situation, we need to think about every environment. Is it going to re-traumatize the individual? That's gonna drastically impact their ability to rehabilitate and reintegrate. And what I often say is just re-engagement in the community. We talk about reintegration, but it's actually engaging with the community is really tough. How do we actually take that first step to go outside?

Karenza Louis-Smith 13:09

And and also as well, I think when we think about stigma and discrimination, so the minute you say someone's been to jail, like that's like, whoa, alert. That's right. You know, all of those kind of things come up, don't they?

Chelsea Troutman 13:20

And trauma sits in, it sits in every aspect of you. It sits in your learning history, so your expectation of staff. You don't trust people. You assume they're gonna let you down. It changes the way your brain functions. In a prison environment, your stress levels are probably a bit higher because you're on natural alert all the time, and that's your survival instinct. So you're more likely to engage in those maladapted behaviors that kept you safe and surviving. But also, if you think about it, your stress levels go up, your cognitive processing goes down. So your capacity to communicate, to listen, to remember things drastically reduces. So it can feel quite terrifying to be in this environment and think, I don't have memory, I can't remember what to do, I don't know what this is for. They tell me I need to take medication, I don't trust who's given it to me, I don't know who the doctor is. You're in this constant state of fear and distrust, which means you are constantly sitting in this hyper-vigilant state. So it drastically impacts your ability to engage in treatment effectively. Whereas what I was trying to say in the presentation was if we create these enabling environments, and in the UK, they've demonstrated they've created 10 standards out of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and it's 10 standards that demonstrate an enabling environment, and it really focuses on this therapeutic environment. And everyone's equal staff, the participant, everyone is equal.

Karenza Louis-Smith 14:40

That's quite a radical concept, isn't it? You just pause for a second, so everyone's equal. Because a lot of people would say actually, no, they're not. Like, hello, sorry, I'm a prison guard, I am not equal to a prisoner in this space.

Chelsea Troutman 14:51

I think that the important part is the value base. It's creating a culture of rehabilitation. So it's actually from the outset, if you put all these 10 standards in place through various routines, effectively you're creating a culture that everyone feels optimistic, hopeful, and they can see rehabilitation is the focus. So you absolutely have to hold that value base that has to be strong within the entire setting in order for it to work.

Speaker 7 15:18

Wow. And so they've done that in the UK. They've actually put that in place and it's accepted as part of this is how we do stuff.

Enabling Environments And UK Standards

Chelsea Troutman 15:27

There's quite a number of studies that are on the Royal College of Psychiatrists where they present the outcomes of enabling environments. And there's a number of prisons who have embraced this idea. And the outcomes are great: staff safety, staff well-being, prisoner safety, prisoner engagement and treatment, which is all any of us want, right? We want to go to work and we want to feel safe. And we all know working with this population, there is significant risk of harm across the board, right? We're managing risk of harm to the individual, the community, and ourselves and our staff. So everyone wants to just go feeling psychologically and physically safe. So creating a culture where that is paramount is everyone's psychological and physical safety as your foundation. It means you're tapping into that trauma-informed practice, but then you're essentially demonstrating the escalation of what that means. So you're creating a culture that builds upon one another. It's a sense of belonging, agency, communication needs are met across the board. So it's all that universal design to set up an environment where people can thrive. It's an enabling space and it actually facilitates access to opportunities for rehabilitation. You can't assume you can just rehabilitate in in a broken system. You don't thrive in an environment that naturally disables you.

Karenza Louis-Smith 16:42

No, you don't. No one does, you're right. And your analogy of the school teacher to school teachers is a really, really powerful one. And I don't think anybody would argue and say that if prison was doing a really good job, we would be rehabilitating people that are in jail. And yet we also have this discourse that's like, oh, you can't give people in jail hello, no, no, no, no, they're they're here because they're bad. We can't give those things, and then what happens is we get this kind of revolving door, right? And people just go in and out and in and out, and we don't change anything.

Chelsea Troutman 17:12

And then clients often feel like no one cares what's the point.

Speaker 7 17:18

Yeah.

Speaker 2 17:18

And we're asking them to put all this effort into treatment, and we're asking them to comply with certain procedures and meetings and attendance. I'm not asking for compliance, I'm asking for engagement because someone can show up and it means nothing. Someone can participate and we can participate together, and we can say, we're in this together, we're on this journey together, we can do this and it's going to be tough, but we we're here and we can do it together. That creates possibility, that creates hope. And unless you feel like you have people in your corner, it's kind of no point in putting the effort in to engage in the treatment.

Universal Design And Staff Culture

Karenza Louis-Smith 17:54

And do you see, I mean, in the Australian context, any kind of work like that happening here? I think there's lots of good work happening, and especially when you look at specialist units with forensic disability, I think there is lots of really good work happening. I would love to see more universal design. I would love to see that within a prison setting, for example, we know there's high levels of communication deficits. So why wouldn't we address the communication needs of the general population? And having visual aids and having different opportunities of ways to be told information in advance. Having, you know, a routine board, for example, is something to promote someone's ability to engage in routines. Having opportunity for choices in their routine as they progress to maybe next stages of treatment. That's an opportunity that you're practicing those skills, but at the same time, you're utilizing those universal systems of effective communication. That's not just with the specialist units, that's across the board. Doing that with staff is really important because the more we do it with our staff, the more they're more likely to model these behaviors into our clients. So you you do see good practice across the board in SnippBits, but I don't think there's a real universal design or a universal narrative saying, actually, we need to create a therapeutic culture that focuses on rehabilitation. And it's every point of contact can be therapeutic. From when you walk in the front door and see your admin staff, that is therapeutic. How we engage with our person, we're going to prepare them to show up to their supervision meetings. We're going to give them information in advance about what the medical appointment would look like. And these are the questions you can ask about treatment. So you don't just say no to treatment, you actually are able to make a concerted decision based on it. And so you're empowered in that discussion. And it's a much more harmonization approach, and you're able to think through what your all your options are. I don't see that collectively across the board. I don't think it's the same energy that's put towards it. And I don't know if there's enough around the actual culture of a prison setting or a custodial setting, or just even within disability services restrictive settings.

Chelsea Troutman 20:05

I think with high-risk individuals, we tend to see if we don't have a solid culture that's based in the same value base around reintegration, rehabilitation, pro-social behavior change that's built around hope and compassion and empowerment. If we don't have that in place, we tend to see more restrictions. And we see the pendulum focus more on management than treatment.

Karenza Louis-Smith 20:31

And I guess your argument is that management only manages a situation, but treatment changes it.

Chelsea Troutman 20:39

That's right. And there's a balance. You need a balance. You need the management to facilitate the treatment. But management doesn't have to be coercive and fear-based. Management can be boundaries and can be clear with clear expectations, clear policies in place. But if you have a culture that is focused on rehabilitation, the way you engage in the management, it will create safety for everyone.

Karenza Louis-Smith 21:04

We've been asking everyone that we've been talking to on GetReal here at the 2025 Complex Needs Conference. If you had a magic wand that's been given to you and you can make radical change, what is it that you would use it to do?

Chelsea Troutman 21:20

I would change the youth justice system. So nothing, nothing too big then, Chelsea. Nothing too big. I would absolutely advocate to keep young people away from a prison custodian environment and look more on therapeutic communities and providing them a safe home. We don't want to manage the absconding behavior that leads to high risk behavior. We want kids to want to stay home. We want kids to have a home or have a care setting they want to participate in, they want to be with. We want kids to have a number of safe places they can access. So I would much prefer to see young people, particularly given their trauma histories. And their complex relationships, I would much prefer seeing them access a therapeutic community environment that could actually focus on habilitation and rehabilitation more than tough on crime, adult crime.

Karenza Louis-Smith 22:14

Which is a big conversation happening, I think, in all all across Australia, actually, not just here in Victoria where we are today. But you know, you look at Alice Springs, some of the conversations up in the top end, you know, up in Queensland. It's a hot topic, isn't it? Youth and youth gangs and youth crime and let's get tough on crime and lock them up. And and I'm hearing you say, well, that's going to change nothing. We're just going to lock people up where you're going to give them an apprenticeship to be to offend further in life, right? This is the best place you're going to go and learn. So we need to think and do things differently.

Chelsea Troutman 22:44

Yeah, that's right.

Balancing Management With Treatment

Karenza Louis-Smith 22:46

So just my kind of last comment, really question for you, is if people listening, you know, who who are in in situations where they can actually make these changes, what environmental changes do you think make the most significant diff difference when it I guess it comes to promoting that really positive pro-social behavior? Like two or three, if there were two or three things, like the secret herbs and spices, that people did it, it would make the biggest difference.

Chelsea Troutman 23:17

If we treat people with respect, then they know that's expectation and they will feel a sense of worth. And so what I said in my presentation is learning is a social process. And so those key ingredients will be if we would like to see behavior change, we must act it first. We must model it first, and we must provide multiple opportunities to feel it's possible, to feel hope, and to practice. And they need to experience if it fails and they have a hiccup, bump them the road, that someone's going to be there because they give a shit.

Karenza Louis-Smith 23:51

Yeah. That's huge. So, Chelsea, if people listening, if they want to know more about your work or get in contact, is that easy to do?

Chelsea Troutman 23:57

Yes. So I own a practice called Elements ABC. And my email is ctroutman at elementsabc.com. We're easy to find. We're on the website. Just look up Elements ABC. We have a video that kind of speaks to this value base and speaks to how to look after the most marginalized group of our society and so that everyone knows they matter.

Karenza Louis-Smith 24:19

And finally, are there any closing comments or things that you'd like to say?

Chelsea Troutman 24:25

I love the science of behavior. I will absolutely promote teaching skills, meeting people's personal needs. But we cannot only look at the through a lens that focuses on the client. We have to look at the entire setting the client is functioning within. We need to look at the context, we're expecting this, and we need to think what we're expecting from our clients. Have we put in the same energy to our staff to ensure that they show up that day and they can actually facilitate this treatment in the most effective way? We need to look at the whole system. And this is representative of our community, to be fair. We're a very fragile community, and we need to look at the health and well-being of all of us. And we need to look at all those dimensions of an enabling environment to ensure everyone's psychologically safe, everyone's empowered, everyone has an opportunity to show up to work and say, Oh, I matter, I belong. And they will deliver the best rehabilitation and optimism for our clients that they need.

Karenza Louis-Smith 25:19

I love it, and I love the sense of hope, Chelsea, that you give in this conversation. So thank you so much for joining us on this very special edition of Get Real live from the 2025 Complex Needs Conference in Melbourne.

Chelsea Troutman 25:32

Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 3 25:36

You've been listening to Get Real, talking mental health and disability brought to you by the team at Irma365. Get Real is produced and presented by Emily Webb with Karenza Louis Smith and special guests. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.