HOPE Probation: A New Path to Desistance?

This article seeks to understand Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE) program through a desistance framework. The article commences with a brief overview of the literature on desistance and HOPE. It then explains how HOPE works. The main section of the paper describes observations of HOPE in action and the extent to which these align with McNeill et al.’s (2012) eight principles of desistance. The paper concludes with some observations on the HOPE program as a pathway towards hope, desistance and the promise of better communities.
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This article builds on the earlier research and is innovative in two key ways. Firstly, although Kleiman et al. (2017: 748) have described HOPE as a ‘desistance-mandate’ program, their discussion was framed around desistance from drug use rather than the desistance literature in criminology. Nor has other research examined HOPE within this framework. Indeed, the program’s development was not explicitly framed in this context, with no mention of desistance by Alm (2013, 2015) or the Institute of Behavior and Health ((IBH), 2015). Bartels (2017) made some tentative comments about how HOPE may promote desistance and called for further research examining HOPE through a desistance framework. This article takes the first step in addressing this issue.
Secondly, HOPE itself is innovative; in fact, it was included by Harvard University in its 25 Innovations in American Government Award in 2013. Hawken et al. (2016) recently observed that HOPE inspired practitioners and policy-makers to rethink offender management and the role of sanctions and incentives in motivating behavioural change. In turn, this gave rise to a ‘growing willingness to consider bold innovations to address nagging failures in corrections’ (2016: 71). Most of the literature on HOPE has examined it in the context of deterrence (see e.g. Hamilton et al., 2016; Hawken and Kleiman, 2009; Oleson, 2016; Nagin, 2013), but Bartels (2016, 2017) has suggested that HOPE is better understood through the lens of therapeutic jurisprudence and as a form of problem-solving court. HOPE adopts many of the features of drug courts (see Oleson, 2016 for a comparison; see also Bartels, 2016; Kleiman, 2009: 40–41). However, unlike drug courts—and other similarly intensive forms of judicial case management—’HOPE is for the masses’ (Alm, cited in Bartels, 2015: 55) and represents an ‘approach to probation management that can go to scale’ (Kleiman, 2015: 1626). Accordingly, HOPE’s innovation lies in its combination of a swift, certain and fair response to probation violations with an efficient use of resources under a problem-solving model. Arguably, HOPE’s potential in this context has been underrealised to date, owing to misunderstandings about the program.