Community corrections: a powerful field.

Community-based sanctions are a crucial element of the U.S. criminal justice system. For the past several years, probation and parole populations have grown to nearly 5 million adults. (1) That growth has been accompanied by an increase in offender conditions of supervision, creating serious workload concerns. Funding for community corrections programs has not kept pace with growing community corrections populations and the related increase in community corrections officer workload. (2) Judges and paroling authorities have imposed more release conditions on offenders, dramatically impacting the workload of community corrections officers. (3)

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Stagnating and often decreasing budgets have forced community corrections officers to do more tasks for more offenders with the same or less funding than was available in the past. (4) The results of this scenario include inflated caseloads and unrealistic workloads for community corrections officers trying to fulfill their public safety functions of short-term risk management and long-term behavioral reform of offenders. It has long been acknowledged in the community corrections profession that maintaining realistic workloads is a necessary prerequisite to ensure community corrections accomplishes its public safety and social justice mission.

This article addresses several issues related to the rising community corrections population and the potential impact this has on officer workload. As mentioned above, not only are caseloads growing, but offenders with more needs are being placed on community supervision, requiring more officer time per offender. To address these conditions, administrators should: 1) engage in more collaborative efforts with justice and nonjustice organizations; 2) use supervision strategies that combine surveillance, treatment and enforcement; 3) individualize supervision conditions; and 4) recognize the power of community corrections' resources to improve public safety.

Collaboration for Public Safety

The criminal justice system is comprised of numerous components, or subsystems, one of which is community corrections. Perhaps increased collaboration across the criminal justice system would enhance the ability of subsystems like community corrections to maximize limited resources and better manage workloads. Collaboration among the various branches of the criminal justice system is essential. These separate justice subsystems are, at least conceptually, interdependent with regard to accomplishing the public safety and justice mission of the overall criminal justice system.

The reality of the criminal justice system as an interdependent set of organizations working toward the same goals is far from idea. At best, the criminal justice system remains a loosely connected group of organizations, and collaboration, when it occurs, is generally short-lived. What does it mean to be loosely connected? Simply put, it refers to the interdependence and "cooperation at a distance" that exists between politicians, the judiciary, law enforcement, and institutional and community corrections.

Community corrections is frequently on the receiving end of many justice system actions with regard to processing crime and criminals. Therefore, community corrections professionals must deal with decisions made by other components of the criminal justice system. Community corrections agencies do not possess the same level of discretionary decision making authority as police officers, who make arrest decisions, or prosecutors, who make charging decisions. Collaborative efforts are essential to effective community sanctions, and there are many examples of multiagency teams improving the effectiveness of various justice system professionals. Consider the centrality of collaboration, for instance, in what English, Pullen and Jones referred to as the "containment model" of supervision for sex offenders, which relies upon cross-agency collaboration between law enforcement, probation and/or parole, the judiciary, treatment providers, and polygraphers. (5) This collaboration makes it possible to provide external control to offenders' lives with the hope of building internal controls within the offender.

Another example is Boston's anti-gun initiative known as Operation Ceasefire, which incorporated ministers, a police gang task force, probation and parole officers, and others to mount a focused proactive search for individuals considered at high risk of illegally possessing and using firearms, mostly young gang members. (6) The containment model and Operation Ceasefire are only two of many examples of how cross-agency collaboration can improve justice system functioning by integrating the unique powers of each agency.

A Misperceived Field

Community-based sanctions are often perceived by the public as soft on crime and lacking a truly punitive element. (7) This public image constrains community corrections professionals by creating a political and public environment that devalues community corrections and seeks more punitive criminal justice mechanisms. The "soft on crime" image of community corrections, however, is misleading. Joan Petersilia reported that in certain community corrections jurisdictions, offenders routinely indicated that they felt probation and parole was more punitive than prison or jail. (8) What accounts for this contradiction between public and offender perceptions? Why is it that many offenders realize the seriousness of a community sentence, while the public perceives such a sentence as allowing an offender "to get away with it"?

One of the major contributors to the public perception of community corrections is that some community corrections jurisdictions are not provided with sufficient resources to adequately supervise offenders. Or it may be that the general public is unaware of the reality of life under credible forms of community supervision. The public's misperceptions are understandable in light of the media coverage of community corrections. Nearly all major media coverage of probationers and parolees is about the negative actions of some offenders and not the successes of other offenders under community supervision. Community corrections professionals have consistently demonstrated their professionalism with a willingness to adopt evidence-based practices, provide comprehensive surveillance using newly developed approaches and employ individualized interventions. As a result, many offenders become involved in pro-social (i.e., compliant, noncriminal) behaviors and avoid the negative secondary deviance effects of incarceration such as stigma, separation from family and support networks, and unemployment.

Community corrections agencies can promote their public safety and justice mission through a balance of rehabilitative and punitive techniques. Strategies that use both rehabilitative and punitive tools must integrate treatment, surveillance and enforcement. If the community corrections field is going to identify overall organizational goals (e.g., improved public safety), then administrators must locate effective and efficient interventions that are geared toward individual offenders and rely upon a continuum of responses, which can be punitive or rewarding depending on offender behaviors.

An Evidence-Based Strategy

Although the majority of adult offenders under correctional control are supervised by community corrections officers, only recently has a body of empirical research developed that identifies the most effective conditions and programs for community corrections. (9) Often community corrections officers have little or no input in determining supervision conditions. The conditions are usually imposed in a non-evidence-based way by judges, paroling authorities and legislative entities. It is frequently the case that those who impose conditions of supervision may not fully understand the realities of supervision and the importance of using evidence-based methods for identifying an offender's criminogenic needs, which are directly related to public safety. Research to date identifies several interesting findings that should be considered when establishing supervision conditions: (10)

* Punitive correctional practices alone do not reduce recidivism;

* Programs that focus on education, vocation and employment training reduce recidivism;

* Programs that work to alter criminogenic thinking patterns--cognitive-behavioral treatment--improve community supervision; and

* Supervision approaches that combine skills training with structured treatment improve offender behavior.

Conditions of community supervision should be based primarily on objective assessments that identify offender characteristics and behaviors that must be targeted in the case planning process in order to promote public safety. Public safety would be enhanced if judges and paroling authorities considered evidence regarding effective correctional interventions prior to sentencing and upon institutional release. Input from community corrections professionals should be sought in developing an overall case plan using risk and needs assessments. Community corrections officers routinely assess an offender's risks of re-offending to identify the areas in an offender's life that should be affected to reduce the potential for probation or parole failure. This approach establishes an overall supervision strategy that intervenes in those areas of an offender's life that are found to relate to re-offending. Each offender has certain background characteristics (e.g., criminal history, substance abuse) that interact with dynamic characteristics (e.g., intoxication, rage, anger). Knowing these characteristics helps predict future offender behavior and hopefully will enable the offender to avoid certain situations. Community corrections sanctions should recognize the aspects of an offender's life that have the greatest potential to reduce crime-prone behaviors and increase pro-social behaviors. This approach ensures that offenders receive the most effective interventions and prevents officers from having to enforce conditions that will not improve public safety.

For instance, judges frequently impose abstinence conditions on longtime alcohol or drug abusers. Although this condition, upon first glance, appears logical, it ignores the realities of addiction, which always include a long-term recovery process that involves relapse. A more realistic condition would be to enforce treatment completion and work toward abstinence. Similarly, drug testing has become a common condition imposed by the judiciary even if the offender does not have a history of substance abuse, requiring officer time to conduct, monitor and/or respond to alcohol and drug testing. Often conditions are passed without empirical or theoretical guidance regarding their ability to accomplish justice system goals, which results in ineffective conditions that have little ability to reduce recidivism and may even increase offending (e.g., Scared Straight, boot camps). The recent spate of laws passed against sex offenders is a good example of crime and justice policies being developed with a lack of input from practitioners and researchers. (11)

Resources and Rules

The most effective approaches to community supervision emphasize the need for release contingencies in order to facilitate offender re-integration. (12) Well-designed conditions of supervision shape the re-integration process by forming the basis of a case plan that targets those behaviors that place the public at the greatest risk. Areas of an offender's life that are known to be related to noncompliance and criminal behavior include dysfunctional family relationships, anti-social friends, substance abuse, low self-control, and anti-social attitudes and values. (13) Well-designed case plans should identify risks and needs in offenders' lives and target interventions according to these aspects to promote public safety. The identification of gaps in services to offenders is crucial because it is a necessary first step to articulating the need for resources--in this case, treatment, employment, education, etc.--to eliminate these gaps.

Supervision conditions provide clear guidelines for appropriate behavior, and they serve to structure the everyday movements of an offender in pro-social ways. The specific rules mandated and the resources offered should be based on a risk and needs assessment and officer knowledge of the specific conditions most appropriate for each individual. Conditions should be established by individuals who are intimately familiar with the complexities of criminogenic need deficits, responsivity, and the empirical and theoretical underpinnings of successful offender recidivism reduction. The 6th Judicial District of Iowa has taken this idea of matching the risks and needs of offenders with supervision conditions and adjusting offender case plans according to changes in offenders' lives using its Matrix system. The Matrix is a computer-based risk and needs assessment instrument that automates many officer decisions by taking offender information and entering it in the system. The Matrix uses a database of offender performance ratings, program effectiveness, offender characteristics and other information to calculate the probability of individual offender behavior based on the projected case plan decision. This system takes seriously the notions of risk and needs assessments as well as officer workload issues by streamlining the assessment process to provide officers with a guide to supervising each offender. The suggested case plans are supported by the judiciary through community correction officer participation during sentencing.

By viewing conditions of supervision as resources and rules for pro-social living, it becomes clear that conditions should take into consideration the areas of an offender's life that increase his or her chances of failing. What might not be obvious is that when conditions are not supported by prior research or related to an offender's life, community corrections agencies become extremely inefficient and ineffective, and they end up "piling on sanctions." (14) Officers' time is taken up administering dozens of alcohol and drug tests each week; deciding whether to violate someone for failure of a urinalysis; and finally, going through the bureaucratic and legal procedures to complete a violation. Some violations place an addict in jail or prison where there are even fewer opportunities for treatment. Eventually the violator returns to the community, and the addiction persists. For community corrections to be effective, crime and justice policymakers need to make better use of existing research and theory about offender recidivism reduction. It is also important to acknowledge that more research is needed to understand the relationships between recidivism reduction and organizational structure, organizational culture and the professional orientations of individuals working within the community corrections field (e.g., law enforcers vs. caseworkers).

The need for more organizational research is becoming increasingly apparent as many states are placing a large burden on the community corrections field to supervise sex offenders. Regardless of one's level of support for or opposition to recent sex offender supervision legislation, it is important to recognize the potential consequences stemming from such legislation. (15) Consider recent requirements in some states that mandate lifetime global positioning system (GPS) tracking for certain sex offenders. Such laws sound logical and are passed with the best of intentions; however, there is little research suggesting that sex offenders are less likely to victimize someone if they are being tracked. This is not because the majority of sex offenders are known to commit new sex crimes but rather the opposite; only a small percentage of sex offenders are known to commit new crimes or sex crimes. (16) It is important to consider the cost of lifetime GPS monitoring--the amount of officer time it will take to do routine aspects such as find a vendor; develop and complete a contract; select, order and receive the equipment; and train officers on how to use the equipment. The question that underpins decisions to allocate resources to these kinds of policies should be: Can public money produce more public safety if spent elsewhere?

Workload Standards and Public Safety

Community corrections policy makers and professional stakeholders need to develop workload standards that are tied to effectiveness with regard to short-term risk management and long-term behavioral reform of offenders. (17) It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine appropriate workload standards at the national level. However, there is a universal model that can work. The model demands an articulation of the outcomes desired by a particular jurisdiction--and indeed, outcomes will vary by region. Once outcomes are identified, the model demands that evidence-based methods for achieving the outcome be developed. (18) These methods should include information about workload requirements. Finally, the model requires community corrections professionals to evaluate how well, or if, the desired outcomes were produced; failure to do so weakens arguments for staff funding and offender services.

ENDNOTES

(1) Glaze, L. and T. Bonczar. 2006. Probation and parole in the United States, 2005. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics.

(2) In this article, community corrections officer refers to probation, parole and pretrial officers as well as individuals who work directly with offenders in community-based residential and nonresidential correctional facilities.

(3) Petersilia, J. 2003. When prisoners come home: Parole and prisoner reentry. New York: Oxford University Press.

See Taxman, F., E. Shepardson and J. Byrne. 2004. Tools of the trade: A guide to incorporating science into practice. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Corrections.

(4) Petersilia, J. 2003.

(5) English, K., S. Pullen and L. Jones. 1997. Managing adult sex offenders in the community: A containment approach. Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice.

(6) Kennedy, D, A. Braga and A. Piehl. 2001. Reducing gun violence: The Boston Gun Project's Operation Ceasefire. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National institute of Justice.

(7) Langan, P. 1994. Between prison and probation: Intermediate sanctions. Science, 264(5160):791-793.

(8)Petersilia, J. 2003.

(9) Andrews, D., I. Zinger, R. Hoge, J. Bonta, P. Gendreau and F. Cullen. 1990, Does correctional treatment work? A clinically relevant and psychologically informed meta-analysis. Criminology, 28(3): 369-404.

Aos, S., M. Miller and E. Drake. 2006. Evidence-based adult corrections programs: What works and what does not. Olympia, Wash.; Washington State Institute for Public Policy.

Clear, T. and H. Dammer. 2003. The offender in the community, second edition. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.

Gendreau, P., T. Little and C. Goggin. 1996. A meta-analysis of the predictors of adult offender recidivism: What works! Criminology, 34(4): 575-607.

Petersilla, J. 2003.

Taxman, F., E. Shepardson and J. Byrne. 2004.

(10) See Aos, et al., 2006; and White, T. 2005. Re-engineering probation towards greater public safety; A framework for recidivism reduction through evidence-based practice. Hartford, Conn.: State of Connecticut, Judicial Branch, Court Support Services Division.

(11) Robinson, L. 2003. Sex offender management: The public policy challenges. Annals of New York Academy of Sciences, 989:1-7.

(12) See Andrews et al., 1990; and Aos et al, 2006.

(13) White, T. 2005.

(14) Lucken, K. 1996. The dynamics of penal reform. Crime, Law and Social Change, 26(4):367-384.

(15) DeMichele, M., B. Payne and D. Button, forthcoming. Electronic monitoring of sex offenders: Unanticipated consequences and policy implications. Journal of Offender Rehabilitation.

(16) See Hanson, K. and M. Bussiere. 1998. Predicting relapse: A meta-analysis of sexual offender recidivism studies. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 66(2):348-362;

Langan, P, E. Schmitt and M. Durose. 2003. Recidivism of sex offenders released from prison in 1994. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics;

Sample, L. and T. Bray. 2003. Are sex offenders dangerous? Criminology and Public Policy, 3(l):59-82.

(17) Paparozzi, M. 2003. probation, parole and public safety: The need for principled practices versus faddism and circular policy Development. Corrections Today, 65(5):46-50.

(18) Burrell, B. 2006. Caseload standards for probation and parole. Lexington, Ky.: American Probation and Parole Association. Available at www.appa-net.org/ccheadlines/docs/Caseload-Standards-PP-0906.pdf.

Matthew DeMichele is a senior research associate and doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology al the University of Kentucky. He is a member of the Council of State Governments and the American Probation and Parole Association. Mario Paparozzi, Ph.D., is chair of and a professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of North Carolina, Pembroke.

Authors' Note: This document was prepared as part of a larger manuscript supported by cooperative agreement award number 2006-DD-BX-K023, awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice.