Newsroom
Utilizing Incentives and Sanctions to Support Successful Outcomes in Treatment Court
Improving Probation Outcomes for Emerging Adults: An Experiment Evaluating a Specialized Caseload in Hidalgo Co., Texas
Incentives can improve probation success: Behavioral science suggests that incentives can lead to better outcomes for people on probation
Major community-supervision policy reforms in four states
Twenty-First Century Illicit Drugs and Their Discontents: Methamphetamine—The Downs of Ups, or Tweaking the Night Away
Baltimore (Mary.) State’s Attorney Ivan Bates addresses collaborative effort to tackle juvenile crime
Winnable criminal justice reforms in 2024
Crime, Punishment, and Expectations: Evidence From the Baltimore (Mary.) Light Rail
Legalizing marijuana in Hawaii will cause harm
Massachusetts responds to probation challenges with a different approach
Criminal Evidence (podcast)
Legislature caps length of Minnesota probation sentences
Making Space for More Compassion with Fewer Rules: Reducing Conditions of Probation to Improve Successful Completion (webinar)
New Pennsylvania probation guidelines for people living with SUD a promising start
Should Americans who misuse alcohol lose the “license to drink”? Here’s how it could work.
Safer, Smarter, and Cheaper: The Promise of Targeted Home Confinement with Electronic Monitoring
America is failing some of its most vulnerable. Here’s a better approach to dealing with addiction.
SCORR helps at Ronald McDonald House in Summit Co. (Ohio)
Promoting Judicial Remarks that Might Serve as Informal Recommendation Letters
Learning from the HOPE program
An excellent place to start is the HOPE program in Hawaii. It was given international attention by Australian Lorana Bartels who visited Hawaii, observed hearings held on probation cases there, and concluded that the HOPE program, which in its language appears to be a strict deterrence program (swift, certain, and fair sanctions) is in actual practice, given the behavior of its founding judge, guided by TJ features. This all likely explains the success of the program in Hawaii!
Lorana Bartels suggested several ways that the program was conducted in a TJ-way. One example lies in the ‘Warning Hearings’, where new probationers are told in clear terms what is expected of them and what the consequences are for non-compliance. The judge noted he gave these warning notices to the group as a whole, obviously to save time, but also so all would know they are being treated exactly in the same way; no special treatment here. Another technique often taken advantage of here is a provision in the general state law allowing, in special instances, the ‘Early Termination of Probation’. The judge noted he awarded this much more than would be the case in the average state probation cases probation. The Early Termination cases are conducted in a somewhat celebratory manner, and on occasion the judge would quote from the impressive remarks made to him by the probation officer. These sorts of judicial statements might indeed be used by the probationer and shared with others – potentially employers, landlords, and the like, where they may in practice serve the function of informal reference letters. If judges and probation officers are given examples of the types of talents, skills, accomplishments of likely interest to persons beyond the probationer and his/her family, we can expect to see an improvement in the usability of judicial remarks and their inclusion of relevant statements by probation officers.
Reentry Research at NIJ: Providing Robust Evidence for High-Stakes Decision-Making
Role of Sanctioning
The goal of community corrections is to ensure that individuals under community supervision comply with their conditions of supervision, do not commit new crimes, and are provided services that address their criminogenic needs to improve long-term outcomes. It is expected that missteps and minor violations will occur—reentry can be complex and nonlinear. The difficulty lies in deciding whether an individual may still be successful on a community sentence after a violation or whether the community sentence should be revoked. Many violations, by themselves, may not warrant the prison term that often results from revocation of a community sentence. If individuals accumulate multiple violations, however, officers may need to decide when it is time to call for revocation.
Hawaii created a probation model—Hawaii Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE)—in which every violation resulted in a short but swift sanction that did not remove the individual from probation. The theory behind HOPE was that the sanction would be severe enough to help modify behavior and introduce accountability, but it would not be as severe as revoking the probation sentence. Individuals would experience the sanction—typically a few days in jail—shortly after the violation was detected, thus reinforcing the link between the sanction and the behavior that led to the violation. This, in turn, would help promote behavioral change among those on probation and parole.
Although initial findings suggested that the HOPE probation model was effective, an NIJ multisite demonstration on the U.S. mainland was not able to replicate the initial successes. HOPE participants were found to have fewer arrests than those on regular probation in two of the four jurisdictions, but overall there was no difference in time-to-arrest or probation revocations. Difficulties in organizational culture and communication among implementing partners, along with the model’s statutory framework, made it challenging to implement HOPE consistently across the four sites, particularly in terms of achieving a uniform definition of probation failure and a return to prison. The HOPE experience illustrates the challenges of adopting a community corrections or reentry program from another jurisdiction, even when the program has some initial indication of success.