Severity Of Probation

15

PROBATION AND
COMMUNITY CORRECTIONS

The extension of probation for felonies still encounters strenuous antagonism and distrust. Most of this antagonism flows from the fear that probation will undermine the efficiency of punishment as a deterrent of crime. Formerly, severity of punishment was believed to be the great deterrent. Severity of punishment has not deterred crime to any great extent.
— FRANK WADE, CONGRESS OF THE AMERICAN PRISON ASSOCIATION, 1923

INTRODUCTION
This chapter considers those forms of correctional supervision that take place outside secure confinement in jails and prisons. These alternatives, founded on probation and the suspended sentence, supervise more than twice as many offenders as are held in secure confinement.
When Cunniff and
Bergsmann profiled probation administration in 1990, they found that only slightly more than half the staff were line probation officers providing direct supervision of criminals. The rest were management and supervisory staff, clerical workers (necessary to process the high volume of paperwork), and support staff, such as technicians, treatment specialists, trainers, custodians, and others.10 Camp and Camp found similar numbers in 2001. About 57 percent of probation staff were line officers, while the remaining staff were performing supervisory, support, and other functions.11 The number of officers actually carrying a caseload is further reduced when you remove from the totals those officers supervising juveniles and performing pretrial and investigative duties not involving direct supervision. In ballpark or unofficial figures, we probably had about 2 million felons being supervised by something fewer than 20,000 officers. This would average out to more than 100 felons per probation officer, not far removed from official numbers.
The issue of reducing caseload size to an ideal number has been argued for a long time. In 1917, a group of probation administrators suggested an
Probation has tended to move away from the casework model in recent years as the emphasis on surveillance and crime control has increased.
In recent years, caseload management has been affected by two important trends: structure and specialization. Probation work is caught up in the effort to provide greater accountability based on outcomes. Many probation agencies use some type of risk/needs assessment instrument in determining how to manage their clients most effectively. Risk/needs assessment is based on those variables in a criminal’s background that are known to be related to recidivism—such elements as age, criminal history, substance abuse, employment history and income, family life, education, and so on. Points are assessed
Corrections: The Fundamentals, by Burk Foster. Published by Prentice-Hall. Copyright © 2006 by Pearson Education, Inc.

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CHAPTER 15

for each variable, and the criminal is assigned a total score, like an exam grade, except here the higher the score, the greater level of risk—a 93 is high risk,