POP Center Responses Monitoring Offenders on Conditional Release Page 4
Police Partnerships with Probation and Parole
Although probation and parole authorities maintain central responsibility for the monitoring of offenders on conditional release, research shows that partnerships with community organizations are highly beneficial.14 Evaluations of these partnerships show that they are successful because each agency provides information, capabilities, and approaches that complement those of others involved in the collaboration. Although potential barriers and hurdles do exist, commitment to an interagency goal of reducing crime among probationers and parolees limits some of these roadblocks.
The police are the most influential partner in offender supervision strategies. The very nature of their public role—to maintain law and order—has relevance for these offenders. Police officers work to ensure that community members follow the law, and they become extremely familiar with the chronic offenders in their jurisdiction. As community corrections agents cannot keep constant tabs on the offenders under their control, it is a practical necessity to incorporate the knowledge base and interpersonal relations skills of the police. Yet, as the police cannot help to supervise all offenders on probation and parole, community corrections agencies should identify for police partners those offenders that are at the highest risk of recidivism.
In addition to the police, offenders’ communities are crucial in encouraging positive supervision outcomes. Community agencies are often responsible for making targets and places less conducive to crime, they can create crime controllers (see Figure 1 on page 5), and they are invaluable bedrocks of treatment options. When police strengthen relationships with community service providers, officers can advocate for offenders needing treatment and can encourage treatment providers to reduce crime opportunities. To be effective, police and social service providers must focus on each offender’s individual risks for recidivism rather than a rule-based zero-tolerance strategy. By using community policing approaches, neighborhood involvement in probation and parole supervision is incorporated. These community collaborations help the police to make neighborhood residents a part of the solution for offenders on supervision.
Organizational Strategies
“What prevents effective partnerships between two justice entities that have the same mission? One answer that I have heard often is that police spend much of their time getting offenders off the street while probation and parole officers are trying to keep these same offenders in the community.”
— Carl Wicklund, Executive Director, American Probation and Parole Association.15
Indeed, police–corrections collaborations can be effective, but the traditional roles of each organization may hinder the chance to achieve offender change. A balanced mission is needed, which is best achieved in a community policing framework.16 Jurisdictions seeking to establish a police–corrections partnership should be prepared for three goal-related problems, as identified by David Murphy’s research on corrections-police partnerships.17 First, officers identify mission creep as problematic, in which their roles and responsibilities expanded beyond what was manageable. Second, mission distortion is common, where officers’ identity in relation to their professional role becomes blurred. Third, officers complain of organizational lag, where agency nonparticipation slow the ability of officers to make progress. These potential problems can be overcome in partnerships with foresight and a commitment to success. Quality collaborations include a clearly defined mission statement, an established understanding of each agencies role, and clear ways to reach the stated goals.18 Two organizational strategies are most effective in meeting these criteria.
The first strategy, which is the most common type of collaboration, involves police and community corrections agencies maintaining clear boundaries. Rather than creating one organization, these two separate agencies find ways to otherwise share information with one another, sometimes in an equally accessible database. In other partnerships, probation officers and police officers meet to exchange information on what is known about and what is expected of offenders under community supervision. This open communication should continue beyond meetings, and police should feel comfortable (even obligated) to contact supervising officers when additional information is obtained or needed. At minimum, these agencies must work together so that police, in routine work, have a clear idea of the high-risk offenders in their jurisdiction.
The second strategy, which has been popularized in recent years, involves police and corrections agents merging roles. Many jurisdictions (mostly in the United Kingdom) are creating multi-agency collaborations referred to as “polibation.” These partnerships create a complementary nature between departments by providing cross-training to officers.19 In one program, a single professional is assigned to provide one-on-one support for an individual offender from pre-release to the expiration of their term. This polibation officer coordinates agency activities, and motivates probation/parole and police to balance compliance with supervision conditions and treatment efforts.20 The presence of a polibation officer allows for others to focus on rehabilitation or control, with the central organizer balancing these competing goals.
Innovative Collaborations
For interagency partnerships to be mutually beneficial and enhance public safety, four features should be present.21 First, the goals, roles, and responsibilities of each partnering agency must be clearly defined. Next, the missions of probation/parole versus police must be balanced, organizationally and in practice. Third, each agent/agency must respect the rights and responsibilities of other involved parties. Finally, the organizational structure of the partnership may need to be modified, and re-modified, to fully support a blossoming partnership.
For a brief review of some successful partnerships, see Table 5 on pages 28–29 (readers should note that not all of these programs are still in existence, although much can still be learned from what elements worked in each of these programs). A common theme in these collaborations is increased communication, fostering teamwork, and increasing reciprocity between agencies. Problem-oriented pairings are best, such as fugitive apprehension units or specialized enforcements, in which the police help to target high-risk probationers and parolees. Successful collaborations exhibit three important points in the supervision process: 1) engagement of the offender in the process of change through the assessment of their crime-causing characteristics and development of a plan to address these factors, 2) involvement in early behavioral changes through the use of targeted services and controls, and 3) sustained change through compliance management techniques.22
Police should partner with community corrections officers as formal controls (constant surveillance) give way to informal controls (such as through family or treatment providers). For low-risk offenders, police should work on establishing rapport, providing positive reinforcement to probationers and parolees observed engaging in pro-social behavior. For high-risk offenders, police may work in a control capacity (such as enforcing curfew), but may also encourage or help offenders who are having difficulty in meeting pro-social needs.
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Table 5. Noteworthy Interagency Collaborations | ||||
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| Collaboration (location) | Overview | Strategic Components for Police |
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| Reentry Partnership Initiative (multiple sites throughout the United States) 22 | These initiatives seek collaboration among a number of community organizations, led by probation / parole and police. The reentry process is viewed as a community-wide system that works collectively to increase public safety and encourage offender change. | During the institutional phase, police may help determine who to include in the partnership (offender classification); in the structured reentry phase, police may oversee community boards that review offender progress and make accommodations to the reentry plan; in the community reintegration phase, officers work to enforce supervision conditions and make recommendations for pro-social engagements that will limit criminal behavior. |
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| Violence Reduction Partnership (Indianapolis, IN) 23; Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce Violence (CIRV; Cincinnati, OH) 24 | These innovate programs included an interagency strategic response to achieve homicide reductions among chronic, at-risk offenders and victims. | Community treatment resources are matched to high-risk offenders, who are identified through collection of shooting data and information obtained from Street Workers. Notification meetings are held for those offenders deemed most influential in the hope that the message of zero-tolerance violence will be delivered to their criminal associates. This focused deterrence, pulling levers approach seeks to respond to continued violence with severe sanctions. |
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| Project Addressing Repeat Criminality (ARC; England) 25 | Targeted persistent drug offenders, offering them a form of intensive supervision. The project relies on individualized assistance, through multi-agency collaboration in case planning. | Both correctional and law enforcement officers work with offenders on creating and abiding by the supervision plan. Offenders are viewed as active participants in their own community supervision. Rather than focusing on heightened surveillance, this intensive program tries to locate areas to exploit offender change, with attitudinal shifts being more important than avoiding behavioral relapse. |
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| Operation IMPACT (New York State) 26 | Aims for a data-driven approach to policing, relying on an exchange of information, tools, and resources between police and probation / parole. | This highly focused initiative emphasizes law enforcement partnerships, crime analysis, and intelligence development / sharing, relying on one another for expertise and assistance. Uses a "no caseload" approach, where officers are assigned geographic units only. Officers work in the community, making frequent home, street, and work / school visits. Officers invest in high-risk offenders, making effort to involve them in pro-social activities. |
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| Supervision Management and Recidivist Tracking Partnership (SMART; Redmond, WA) 27 | Police and community corrections officers work together to make street sweeps, targeting high-risk crime areas to enforce the law and violations of supervision conditions | This partnership operates on the assumption that police should be familiar with community supervised offenders within their beat. Though this program requires officers to step outside their traditional professional roles, the intervention is highly effective but not costly. By collaborating (such as through weekly ride-alongs), the officers may work together to identify community supervised offenders and ensure their with their conditions and the law. |
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| Project Spotlight (TX) 28 | A comprehensive approach to crime reduction that emphasizes offender accountability, but balances control with assistance. | To balance the control of offenders and individualized treatment, officers work with each individual in creating their own case plan. Each offender details their own supervision provisions, treatment goals, and supervision conditions / sanctions. By employing small caseloads, frequent contacts, and multi-agency coordination, the success of the intervention can be attributed to the motivation of individual officers. |
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| Operation Night Light (Boston, MA) 29; Operation Nightwatch (St. Louis, MO) 30 | These police-probation partnerships work to increase compliance with supervision conditions among high-risk offenders. | To achieve deterrence, police and probation officers are paired to enhance supervision. High-risk offenders are given geographic restrictions, and officers make frequent curfew checks, even visiting popular youth hangouts to search for probationers. Community members are incorporated into each individual's case plan, to encourage pro-social behavior and report violations of supervision. |
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| Community Safety Partnerships (multiple sites in the United Kingdom) 31 | An effort to reduce recidivism among supervised offenders by providing a holistic and individualized approach to case planning. | This multi-agency collaboration relies on three mechanisms. First, strategic planning identifies the specific profile of the offender's activity, their risk and needs, and their likely pathway out of crime. Second, problem-solving approaches to operational activities are used, such as through information sharing and targeted policing. Third, case management is required to make individualized choices and modifications to treatment / supervision when necessary. |
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To help police departments and community corrections agencies create meaningful partnerships, we have outlined specific ways officers can assist in monitoring offenders on conditional release. Ideally, collaborations should exercise actions that emphasize both rehabilitation and control.
Rehabilitation
While traditional treatment approaches, such as offender participation in rehabilitation programs, are outside the control of the police, there are many things officers can do to stimulate and maintain law-abiding behavior among probationers and parolees:
- Service referral: Police officers who are familiar with the resources available in their community can refer offenders to services and encourage/help them to follow through.
- Offense interruption: Not only can police disrupt pending criminal activity (e.g., breaking up a large group or monitoring a street segment), they can be advocates for and models of pro-social choices.
- Encourage pro-sociality: Motivation to change is an important component of treatment success, and police officers play an influential role in encouraging offender change.
- Reward reform: When engaging with offenders, police officers should provide praise and other reinforcements when they observe positive behavior.
- Use discretion/graduated freedoms: The interaction style used by police should become more lenient and upbeat as offenders demonstrate gradual desistance.
Control
Because offenders on conditional release have a demonstrable pattern of breaking the law, the police play a pivotal role in detecting, preventing, and responding to relapses in anti-social behavior. In particular, interagency collaborations provide an opportunity for police to enforce conditions of supervision agreements and provide superior surveillance of and information about high-risk supervisees; this allows community corrections agents with useful data and the ability to focus on offender treatment. There are five specific tools that police officers can use to help prevent community supervised offenders from recidivating:
- Maintain leverage: Police represent formal social control, and can use the threat of arrest and supervision revocation (usually leading to incarceration) to provoke compliance.
- Recruit offender handlers: Officers familiar with an offender’s peer group (friends, family, mentors, and neighbors) can influence these individuals to help police these offenders and encourage pro-social behavior.
- Create place managers: To disrupt the attraction of offenders to their normal crime hot spots, police can solicit the help of additional controllers to monitor for misbehavior among community supervised offenders (from breeching a probation stipulation like being out past curfew, to anti-social behavior and law violations).
- Strengthen target guardians: Because officers are familiar with the elements of a situation that attract offenders, the police can help design and implement solutions that change or protect these targets.
- Use discretion/graduated sanctions: Recognizing that zero-tolerance leads to high failure rates, police should be sensitive to the gradual process of offender change; punishments should be proportional to the misconduct, and can be used as teachable moments.
