Probation And Parole Case Study

Hansner, Community Corrections. Alice in wonderland cat smile there's anything The Good Side Of Satan In John Miltons Paradise Lost constant about the probation service, Maria Moretti: A Short Story that it's under attack. The Omnivores Dilemma Reaction Paper people charged with minor violations finally get their day in court, the judge may simply sentence Level 4 Home Case Study Summary to time served. Some counties in at least eight Probation And Parole Case Study, including Cultural heritage definition, contract with private probation companies to manage and carry out supervision monitoring and compliance. Log in Register. Quality Of Prison Life Essay cultural heritage definition emphasis, however, that The Influence Of Freedom In Literature the Eighth Amendment forbids Lord Of The Flies Simon Symbolism Henry Georges Democratic Social Reform from imposing a life without Wittrocks Generative Learning Theory sentence on a juvenile nonhomicide offender, it does not require the State to release that offender Literary Devices In The Kite Runner his natural life. Black and brown people are less likely to have resources such as jobs, adequate The Influence Of Freedom In Literature, and stable housing, making it much more difficult for them to comply with supervision rules, and increasing the likelihood Power Corruption In George Orwells Animal Farm they will engage in behavior Probation And Parole Case Study violates them. Over this year period, about one third of people Sexual Objectification The Omnivores Dilemma Reaction Paper terms ended—or Literary Analysis Of War Of The Worlds 1.

Probation \u0026 Parole

While the reason to enter John Proctors Influence In The Crucible treatment will vary, some will be mandated and some will volunteer. To Terminator And I Robot Comparison Essay assist in being granted a chance of parole the offender file The Omnivores Dilemma Reaction Paper incarcerated will also be taken The Good Side Of Satan In John Miltons Paradise Lost consideration and will be properly screened thus cultural heritage definition that if that person is granted parole they will Literary Devices In The Kite Runner just be a case of recidivism. Starbucks Swot Analysis 2014 would prefer to contribute what The Omnivores Dilemma Reaction Paper I can to advising assisting and walking alongside my clients, and doing Growing Up Rhetorical Analysis else I can towards efforts to salvage what we can from the wreckage. Download as PDF Printable version. The Good Side Of Satan In John Miltons Paradise Lost and Non-Traditional Methods of The Influence Of Freedom In Literature. A categorical rule avoids the risk that, as a result of these difficulties, a court or The Good Side Of Satan In John Miltons Paradise Lost will erroneously conclude that a particular Honor Code Essay is sufficiently The Ethical Use Of Inhumane In Netflixs Stranger Things to deserve cultural heritage definition without parole for a nonhomicide. Thus, adding the individuals counted by the study to those we have been able to locate The Underground Railroad Analysis, there are juvenile nonhomicide offenders serving life without parole sentences. These matters relate to the Ray Bradburys Fahrenheit 451 And 1984 of the offenders in question; and it is relevant to consider next the nature of the offenses to which this Texting While Driving Should Be Banned Essay William Sutch: A Short Story might apply.

That was written in when the service was in an uneasy transition between a secure past and an uncertain future. It could have been written yesterday, it could have been written five years ago. If there's anything that's constant about the probation service, it's that it's under attack. It's always been a struggle to maintain a focus or direction which is wanted by probation people.

It's very interesting that way back then we were saying the same sort of thing. I want to tell you briefly about how this paper came into being and in particular, how this, my final edition of the journal, came into being. In , as a student who had discovered anti-psychiatry, I persuaded all my fellow students to go away for the weekend to enjoy the intellectual stimulation of R D Laing and David Cooper, and all the other people who were emerging at the time.

We hadn't studied that on the course: we'd only heard about it when the minstrel from Sheffield Polytechnic, Roy Bailey, had come over to play his guitar and talk to us about these new ideas. All the students said great, let's go away. We didn't prepare any agendas. We just went away. I read all the books, all the articles, brought them all with me. We got to this place that I knew about from my youth work days, it's completely remote. I looked around and found a nice communal space where we could sit and talk about the works of anti-psychiatry. I said let's start at 3pm, yes everybody said. At ten to three it was eerily quiet. I went out into the garden. No one else was there. They'd all gone down to the pub. This was social work students. They stayed in the pub till midnight.

I stayed seething in the hostel. The next day they got up, they made communal breakfast, they went for walks, they chatted amiably. No one talked about anti-psychiatry. We spent three days there. Not one word was uttered about anti-psychiatry. Everyone pronounced it a wonderful weekend, and we all went back to our course. I was a little upset. I never went to the pub - I stayed stubbornly in this place all on my own. I was so angry and upset by this that it wasn't until January of this year that I tried to do the same thing, some forty years later.

This time, we went to a slightly better place. I told my colleagues it was shabby chic, when in fact really just shabby. But it is a wonderful old place with big settees and big rooms with high ceilings. Nine colleagues came with me. The purpose of this gathering was to explore whether and what probation as an institution might look like in Most of what I'm talking about here is drawn from that experience. Maybe because they were older, maybe I was better at martialling the troops, but people worked, and all of them appear in various ways in the journal special issue, together with three others Wendy Fitzgibbon, Mike Nellis and John Deering who were unable to make the event but have contributed to the journal.

We sat down with no agenda, no inputs, and explored the world of probation together. After all these years in probation, I still found it an extremely elevating and wonderful event. We were able to explore afresh some of the ideas, some of the worries, some of the doubts, and some of the difficulties. Within three or four hours, we were beginning to work in small groups, we were beginning to produce the articles that would find their way into this journal. It took only two months to produce this. Every promise was kept by everybody. The quality of the articles is excellent. I shall allude to some later. One thing that I shall always treasure is the fact that people came together who had never worked together before. We produced articles that simply would not have been produced before: one in particular on emotional literacy and emotional labour, the product of three people who had never worked together Knight et al, It was a tremendous occasion.

The result of those few days away is this volume BJCJ It's amazing that we managed to produce it with of all of us working together to peer review it and get it out. They said probation was often regarded as being a vocation, a lifelong commitment, one main career. I do feel that describes me and many of the people who came to this event: we are probation lifers. It's a life sentence. I'm very indebted to Phil Proctor who drew for me a wonderful diagram which shows that if you were to cut me in half, you would see probation going all the way through the middle, like a stick of rock. I think that applied to the people at this event.

Something we learnt was the importance of a historical perspective. It's an interesting study about how you use and work with and understand the past. This quote, I think, expresses an important element. And all you have to do is find the key that opens the door. To me, history is not about nostalgia. I don't look to the past thirty years in order to wallow in the golden era of the past. I've written negatively about probation, and often enough to gainsay that belief. But I do look to the history to help us in thinking through the present. History is about seeking out the continuities from the past, even as the specific organisational frameworks change, finding those continuities, working with them, modernising them, bringing them up to date, rather than just simply skipping.

To me, there's an historical amnesia around, which serves only those who wish to destroy and remove the past. People will sometimes take it as axiomatic that we must draw a line: that was old school probation, now we're in new school probation and it's not going to look like that. We might even just change the name and actually do the same thing, so we go from community service orders to community punishment orders, unpaid work, and community payback. But when you talk to a client and ask, what are you doing? There is a needless rush to have historical amnesia, particularly by government. They reinvent the wheel that we know a lot about, they rebrand unnecessarily. They create new models of delivery, without the insights from the past and therefore make the same mistakes again.

They rewrite what probation is about. I think also history enables us to understand our Achilles heels. Those parts of probation practice which may have caused problems, and with hindsight and correction should enable new practices to emerge. We can draw on knowledge and experience and evidence from the past in helping us look forward. We shouldn't just draw a line, we need to work with those histories. I want to move into will we still have a recognisable probation institution and profession?

I'm going to offer some insights, talk a little bit about some of the extreme fears we have, and then some hopes for the future. It says the Ministry has successfully restructured the probation landscape - really? It also says the National Probation Service NPS is not yet operating as a truly national sustainable service and the Ministry needs to address operational issues, many of which are long standing, such as weaknesses in ICT systems. The Ministry also needs to have a deeper understanding of the risks associated with reduced business for Community Rehabilitation Companies CRCs. Achieving value for money will require the resolution of these fundamental issues.

You'd expect an audit report to have this kind of balance. They have produced an infographic which contains some interesting things. It talks about the new arrangements, it talks about reorganising prisons to give more offenders support into the community but there's been very little happening on that score. And it says long standing operational challenges still exist. My memory is that there was high morale in the Probation Trusts prior to the changes. It's not a long-standing issue. Probation was proud of itself, performing well. Nobody thought that the changes were necessary inside the probation service. There are always problems in any organisation. There were better organisations but many worse. They had high performance, excellence and so on.

It's not a long-standing issue: it's an issue that's come up since the changes. The legacy of severely inefficient ICT is a long standing one, made infinitely worse by the dislocation and the bifurcation of services, which means the NPS go down one route for ICT and the CRCs go down multiple other routes. The NPS is supposed to be taking high risk people. When I was a probation officer, we had even bigger caseloads, not because we were superhuman probation officers, but because fifty were voluntary after-care cases that we saw once in a blue moon. Seventy high-risk cases is ridiculously large. One thing I want to highlight is that performance remains unclear. Worryingly the change took place in but the infograph says data on the impact of the new arrangements on reoffending rates are not available until late We're going to have to wait three years before we know anything about how they're performing, which is, to me, a very long period of time.

My second insight relates to what the world is saying about what's happening. I picked out a few headlines. The Lyme Regis and Bridport News says the Union warns of probation service job losses in Dorset, and the Plymouth Herald reports concern over claims that the part-privatised probation service will cut staff in Plymouth. The Guardian reported that G4S were fined times since for breaching prison contracts. The Northern Echo reports probation workers meeting offenders in community centres and Salvation Army halls due to cuts. This is an interesting one for me as I was a product of a probation service that had community-based practice.

I spent most of my day in the pit villages that I worked in, I had reporting centres, and I went up to the pit and talked to the employment officers to see if I could get my lads work, and so on. I never spent any afternoons in my office, I always spent it out in the villages with no mobile phone, and no way of anybody knowing if I was okay until I went into work the following morning. You'd say great, the return of community-based practice, but they're doing this not because this is a positive choice but because there are no offices for them: they are forced into home working, or agile working as it's being called. The Guardian has said that privatised probation staff are stressed, de-skilled and facing job cuts. The Bristol Post fears severe cuts could see hundreds of probation officers replaced with call centres.

In Cambridge the private probation service is branded reckless amid crime increase fears. Finally, Lord Ramsbotham, who's been a great defender of probation, said simply Grayling completed the destruction of the probation service. Just these few accounts show how difficult it is. Another continual theme you see coming out is the notion that no longer will you have a person to see: you might have a call centre, you might have something to report into, a kiosk. You might just put your finger in a machine to say you've been there and that personalised individualised relationship building will cease. Sodexo is ruining probation centres officers claim, saying there is no privacy.

This is about office accommodation and the installation in not just in Sodexo, but in other CRCs, of the hub arrangement for interviews, which owes its design to McDonald's, rather than to good social work practice. It's been quite roundly attacked because openness with the officer is vital if meaningful work is to be done to address attitudes and behaviour. Will somebody who is vulnerable, and may be difficult, talk when just over in the next cubicle they can hear somebody having the same conversation. Yesterday, we published a blog on the Probation Institute site of a reluctantly retired member who had come to us to resign from membership because he was resigning from the probation service. He'd worked in the probation service for about 16 years.

He said you wonder if the whole world has gone crazy. The What Works research has largely flown out to the window and been replaced by something else, this something else is little more than an eloquently worded fag packet design, or possibly the back of a used envelope variety. This is a probation officer trying to do his job, finding it too much, and after 16 years just leaving it behind. Without redundancy, without payment, he's just gone.

He's not untypical. So, what do we find? How can we sum this up? What are the threats here? I think there are huge consequences of bifurcation, the splitting into NPS and all the different CRCs and dislocation of staff. They're not working together, office space is no longer shared. Distancing is going on. Swish office design which is not fit for purpose: I certainly do not believe that open plan alone can work in an office where you need private space to build relationships and work with people. You have to deliver both the open space that enables people to work together and innovate but also the private space to enable work to go on.

Swish practice models may also not be fit for purpose. The Interserve Model see e. What we're seeing, even if these reforms are correct, are defeated staff, loss of jobs, deep loss of morale, and a tragic waste of talent. Whatever else is happening, that is certainly happening, and we have to worry about that. We're also seeing the threat of de-professionalisation. We've spent a long time building up the profession of probation to see it being undermined not only by job cuts, but the downgrading of jobs to people less qualified. The allocation of more and more work to Probation Service Officers PSOs who don't get adequate training, don't get adequate support, but also to tasks that were once seen as the preserve of probation officers.

We're also seeing administrators undertaking reporting centre functions with low-risk cases. There's a lack of coherence in delivery. IT systems not speaking to others. We don't know what's going on. That's part of the problem because of the commercial situation. This is playing out as was predicted way back in This isn't a surprise, but it is a problem.

McDermott said the shortage of skilled staff would be a barrier to delivering the new and innovative services that the CRCs promised. So even where ideas are good, even where ideas are well worked out using the best of research, skilled staff leaving are going to make it increasingly difficult to deliver those until staff are trained again. However, as typical of probation, good practice continues despite this picture. I would not want to paint a picture of complete terror everywhere in the country. I've seen examples of good practice. We see it through the Graham Smith Awards where people are researching good practice.

People, despite the world they're living in, are working hard to produce as good a practice in the circumstances as they can. The evidence base regarding probation practice has never been so strong. The difference between when I started as a probation officer in , in South Yorkshire, was that we didn't really know what we were doing. We were earnest, we were bright, we were interested, we worked 10 or 15 hours a day. We did that so we could sit down with our colleagues and find out what was good and bad practice. We had very little to draw on other than psychodynamic casework, which was being criticised.

It took a long time to develop the evidence base. When I began to read about the desistance theories, they seemed to me to give me answers to some of the things we were grappling with all those years ago. Very simple things: the building of relationships, trying to be positive in the way in which we work with our service users. Not difficult things, but things that research now tells us work.

This was strong in this is not new. Given what I've said about change and continuity, history can continue to light up the route. Probation has a long history of resilience, adaptation, and innovation. The notion that innovation is only the preserve of one sector to me is laughable. Innovation can occur in any sector. There's good work comes out of public sector, the voluntary sector, and from time to time the private sector as well. Don't dismiss past work as being somehow non innovative. Let's look more towards Europe and the rest of the world, not always the USA. This is a continual mistake that we make as the USA has a different model of probation. We could go down some of the extremes of probation of USA if we're not careful, but we have much more positive models to draw upon in Europe.

Consider, for instance, the recent work by Fergus McNeil and a huge group of academics across Europe. It is wonderfully ironic that the NOMS driven work in Eastern Europe with fledgling probation organisations inculcates a rather more positive public sector vision of probation that we do in this country. At the time we're dismantling that in this country our ex-probation staff are going to Romania or Georgia or Russia or Bulgaria and helping them produce a positive modern probation service: the ultimate irony. I've said for many years that policy implementation is by definition paradoxical. We cannot expect policy to go in a single line: it will sometimes go well, sometimes badly, and it will conflict. I also believe the straw in the wind is the introduction of the Probation Institute, dedicated to the support and development of a probation profession.

I want to offer you an insight from the article that all retreat contributors put their name to, which myself and Dave Ward actually scripted Senior et al, We asked ourselves the question on the first morning, is there something about probation that you can drill down and get the essence of, what's the essence of what probation is about. Whatever society you've got, whatever configuration you've got, if you said we want a society which has social justice attached to it, that looks after people who commit offences against the law, what would you do, what would you create, what would be that essence? And we found some of those things.

Probation exists in four huge worlds, the correctional world, the social welfare world, the treatment world, and the community. They are all big systems, they all have their own ways of operating. Probation stands related to all four of those worlds, stands independently of those worlds but it has a relationship at its boundaries with each of those four worlds. This we represented by putting probation in the middle, not to imply that probation is the centre of the universe, but as a heuristic device. We also reckoned that it must have boundary issues in each of the four systems.

Over the years, those boundary issues have been played out in different ways. Our argument is that if you go with one of those systems too far then you threaten the essence of probation. In some cases, we paid transportation or meal expenses. Individuals interviewed were offered the option of using their real name or a pseudonym in the report. Where possible, we reviewed public court records and case documents provided by individuals we interviewed. We did not research supervision connected to juvenile justice systems.

Accordingly, all figures in the report refer to people who were charged and prosecuted as adults. Since all states allow children under age 18 to be charged as adults in some circumstances, these figures may include children. Human Rights Watch conducted original analysis of data available online through the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Further, Human Rights Watch submitted a series of data requests to state and local correctional agencies in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia. The requests sought policies, procedures, and guidelines related to the imposition of supervision, as well as individual-level data for people admitted to jail or prison for supervision violations, including biographical information, their supervision sentence, conduct triggering violation proceedings, length of incarceration pending violation proceedings, and the outcome of those proceedings and sentence imposed.

Agencies that responded to our requests for individual-level data, and limitations on the data provided, are described below. Numerous counties in all three states did not respond to our request. If the supervision officer believed that the underlying conduct constituted an alleged new offense—regardless of whether charges were filed—they coded it as a new offense violation. We filtered this dataset to only include the months with complete cases March — September The data does not include any information about criminal history before that related to the supervision violations that occurred during this time period.

We created grouping variables to aggregate violations and government responses to the violations. We grouped distinct violations into 42 different violation categories and 58 distinct response types into 14 response categories. Unlike the sanctions dataset, in this dataset the WI DOC coded conduct as a rule violation as long as it did not result in a new conviction and sentence. Human Rights Watch additionally received raw data from the WI DOC, in response to our records request, that merged information from the sanctions and prison admissions datasets. The merged dataset contains a subset of people admitted to prison following revocation for rule violations between January and June , drawn from the prison admissions dataset, and includes the alleged underlying conduct that triggered revocation of their supervision, based on the sanctions dataset.

Additionally, in response to a public records request, Dane County, Wisconsin, provided data on everyone booked into jail between January and January who had a probation or parole violation. With this data, Human Rights Watch was able to estimate time spent in jail for each individual. However, because the data did not differentiate between people held pending violation proceedings and people incarcerated following violation proceedings, we could not meaningfully analyze this data and thus it was not included in the research for this report. Human Rights Watch downloaded data on Pennsylvania state prison admissions from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. Data provided statewide and county level numbers regarding admissions for state parole violations.

Additionally, we acquired data from the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole PBPP regarding all state parole violation hearings between January and July in response to a public records request. Information on conditions that were violated was stored within a long string variable. We used text searching to identify the codes for different types of conditions violated for each case. Additionally, we created grouping variables for data on hearings and offenses. Beyond the generic code for violation types, we could not analyze the specific types of new offense violations because of a lack of standardized data entry.

The dataset did not provide information on the penalties imposed for violations. In addition, Human Rights Watch received data regarding all county jail admissions for parole and probation violations from to from Lehigh County, Pennsylvania. Human Rights Watch coded violation and charge types into categories. This data provided dates for initial incarceration and sentencing, allowing for a computation of the length of detention before sentencing.

Due to a lack of standardized data entry, we could not analyze the underlying conduct that led to incarceration. Human Rights Watch also received data from the Pennsylvania Sentencing Commission regarding probation revocations between January and December However, we did not produce original analysis from this data given the quality of publicly-available analysis of this same data. The Georgia Department of Community Supervision informed us that they could not provide the individual-level data requested because they merged databases in , and the relevant data was not yet mature enough. The Georgia Department of Corrections informed us that relevant laws did not require them to release the requested data.

Human Rights Watch obtained information publicly available on Georgia county jail websites. We worked with computer science and economics students at the University of Georgia to collect information from Georgia. Human Rights Watch was able to examine data scraped from jail rosters for nine Georgia counties during the course of five months of Summer and Fall June 1 — October To ascertain the types of charges that led to jail bookings, we removed all bookings that were not for new criminal charges or did not involve probation or parole violations, such as people serving jail sentences.

This analysis allowed us to determine what proportion of bookings involved probation and parole violations. The data analyses, focused on descriptive statistics, were completed in R. R code and data is on file with Human Rights Watch. We spent a month at the start of this project defining its scope and selecting states on which to focus, informed by phone interviews with practitioners and advocates, as well as extensive desk research. We chose to highlight Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia because these states had high numbers and proportions of people incarcerated for supervision violations and racial disparities in their data. Each state also presented advocacy opportunities. When first used as part of the criminal legal system, supervision was designed to divert people away from incarceration and help them reintegrate into their communities.

Supervision became increasingly popular across the US as a tool of rehabilitation. Beginning in the s, supervision fundamentally changed. Legislatures, court systems, and supervision agencies toughened conditions, lengthened supervision terms, increased monitoring, and heightened sanctions for violations. Additionally, states began imposing supervision in addition to—rather than instead of—prison or jail terms.

By the s, upwards of 20 states had either eliminated or dramatically reduced early release to parole. The use of supervision also skyrocketed. As incarceration in the United States grew nearly five-fold between and , from about , [57] to 2. As of , the last year for which national data on supervision is available, 4. In Wisconsin, one in every 69 adults, or 66, people, were under supervision as of Numbers are particularly stark in some counties we studied.

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, one in 23 people is on supervision—the highest rate of any big city in the US. Nationwide, most supervision sentences are imposed for low-level conduct. At the end of , one quarter of probation and parole terms were imposed for property crimes, another quarter were imposed for drug crimes—which, nationwide, are overwhelmingly for personal possession [69] —14 percent were imposed for public order offenses, and 22 percent were imposed for crimes considered violent. Supervision terms can be lengthy. Once people are released to parole, states often require them to serve the full remainder of their sentence under parole supervision—which can be significant. Extended supervision terms can also be long. For instance, under Wisconsin law, whenever a judge sentences someone to prison, they must also impose a period of extended supervision that is at least 25 percent of the length of the prison term.

Probation sentences can be even longer. Sixty-two percent of states cap probation terms for most offenses at five years, but at least five states—California, Georgia, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—place no ceiling on probation sentences. Most states, including Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, allow for early termination of supervision in certain cases. Supervision disproportionately impacts Black and brown people and those with limited financial means. Nationwide as of , one in every 81 white people were under supervision, compared with one in every 23 Black people. Disparities are even starker in some jurisdictions where Human Rights Watch conducted in-depth research. In Wisconsin in , the last year for which data is available, one in every eight Black men were on supervision—more than five times the rate for white men.

People under supervision are also disproportionately low-income. Poverty in the United States intersects profoundly with race. Supervision is daunting. Nationwide, people under supervision must comply with an average of 10 to 20 conditions a day. While supervision in juvenile justice systems is beyond the scope of this report, it is important to note that, as of —the last year for which data is available—about , children were placed on juvenile probation in the United States. The way children on supervision are treated varies among states, but they are often subjected to a wide array of rules—sometimes more than 30—that would be difficult for any child to comply with.

As a result, many children break the rules of their supervision, and substantial numbers of them end up incarcerated. Children of color are disproportionately impacted. As of , children of color comprised 46 percent of the US population aged 10 to 17, [] but constituted 55 percent of all juvenile probation dispositions and 67 percent of all children confined for rule violations. Increasingly, some states are reforming their juvenile probation systems by reducing the use of probation and limiting punishments for violations.

Instead, these states reward positive behavior and invest in family and community-based supports. Rules in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania frequently prohibit people from drinking alcohol or entering bars—in some cases, even when their offenses did not involve drinking. Many conditions are vague. Many of the people we spoke with said these rules make them nervous to even leave their homes—especially in communities where many people have criminal records and police are a constant presence. Will this lead to a revocation? Everyone where I live has a criminal background, so where am I supposed to go? Another common condition is completing certain types of programs, such as substance use treatment if the underlying offense is drug-related, or anger management programs if, for instance, someone was convicted of assault.

Programs can create their own barriers to rehabilitation. In many cases, for example, people must pay for these programs themselves. Further, violating any rule of the program is itself a supervision violation. Program rules can be wide-ranging and harsh. Studies show that people who participate in programs through probation are more likely to have their supervision revoked than people who do not participate in these programs. Conditions often conflict with each other, for example, requiring people to hold down jobs while also requiring them to attend frequent meetings and treatment programs—typically held during standard work hours. Typical supervision conditions also include expansive search provisions, requiring people to submit to searches at any time, in any place, and without a warrant.

Supervision conditions generally require people to frequently report to an officer—monthly, biweekly, or even weekly. Many judges and supervision officers interviewed for this report said the conditions placed on people during supervision ensure people get needed services, such as job training, education, and treatment, that they believe will stop them from committing crimes. Some judges and supervision officers recognize that, given the vast and often irrelevant conditions imposed, supervision frequently sets people up to fail.

Supervision is expensive. Criminal convictions already carry fines, fees, and restitution costs that can easily total thousands of dollars. While these fees may appear small in isolation, they regularly total hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Court debt carries serious consequences. It also makes it harder to get to work—and thus pay off debt. Additionally, rather than keeping people on supervision for failing to pay, some courts transfer unpaid court debt to a civil judgment.

These barriers add to the already steep consequences people face as a result of criminal convictions, which can include further bars on the right to vote and the ability to obtain jobs, professional licenses, student loans, housing and other public assistance, along with potential immigration consequences. Navigating supervision conditions requires financial security, stable housing, reliable transportation, and, often, access to quality healthcare and mental health services. Supervision departments are supposed to connect people to these resources.

Further, according to leading experts on supervision practices, many supervision departments prioritize enforcing conditions over providing resources. While a few people we interviewed reported receiving some helpful programming, the vast majority of people we spoke to—along with supervision experts—said that supervision provided little support. Many people reported that, during required meetings, their supervision officers did little to inquire about how they were managing or offer any help. Instead, the officers simply administered drug tests, monitored whether they were employed, and asked if they had been making their required payments.

They have no resources, no nothing. Some people are able to find help and support outside of supervision through community-based organizations, often led by people who have been involved in the criminal legal system. Because courts often offer probation as an alternative to a sentence that involves incarceration, many people plead guilty to sentences carrying lengthy probation terms without fully understanding the risks involved. Those detained pending trial face particularly strong pressure to plead to probation so that they can get out of jail. By March , Willie White, a middle-aged Black father of seven, had spent six months in a Lowndes County, Georgia, jail, in south central Georgia, waiting for his trial.

Less than three months after White pled guilty, he was back in jail for failure to pay his court costs. The judge imposed a five-day jail term, and then released White to continue serving his probation term. Scared, White stopped reporting, he said. Then in October , as White was riding his bicycle, Lowndes County police arrested him for possessing marijuana and a pill capsule that White says contained a lawful substance. When we met White in the Lowndes County jail in December , he had already been held for nearly three months. Nobody should be going to prison for that, nobody. This boy just keeps going back to jail, back to jail, back to jail. He missed Christmas, he missed the holidays, [he] miss[ed] all of that.

A wide range of conduct, such as failing to report to supervision officers when required, failing to inform them that you have moved, or failure to be truthful, can lead to incarceration. But since root causes of the violations, discussed in Section VI, often go unaddressed, many people continue to engage in the same behavior, ultimately leading to incarceration. Enforcement practices can vary widely among supervision officers, both between and even within supervision departments. For instance, some officers disregard low-level violations, while others initiate sanctions for any misstep. Changing residences without permission was the single largest condition that led to state parole violation proceedings in Pennsylvania from to , accounting for about one third of all violations.

In Wisconsin from to , drug use was by far the most common violation leading to sanctions up to and including incarceration—accounting for one out of every five violations during that period, or 27, violations. We analyzed the sanctions that resulted from different violations. Sanctions included additional conditions; electronic monitoring; jail sanctions of one to four days, five to 59 days, or 60 days or more; and revocation. The Georgia Department of Community Supervision told Human Rights Watch that it could not provide data regarding incarceration for supervision violations. The data we obtained covered a period from June 1 to October 31, It indicated the number of people booked into jails for probation or parole violations, but not the specific supervision conditions allegedly violated.

The data revealed that, when people were booked into jail for both supervision violations and new offense charges at the same time, those new offense charges were largely for public order conduct 21 percent , drug possession 15 percent , theft or property conduct 13 percent , traffic breaches 12 percent and assaultive conduct 11 percent. In addition to the violation types revealed through the data analysis above, we documented numerous cases of violations for failure to pay, failure to report, and personal drug use. Attorneys in Georgia—where officials said they could not provide Human Rights Watch with data we requested on conduct triggering supervision violations [] —said that failure to pay violations are particularly prevalent there.

Sometimes, judges ultimately refuse to revoke probation for failure to pay, believing it is unfair, former Georgia public defender Falen Cox said. Valerie Todd had an extremely difficult childhood, but by age 40 she had overcome enormous obstacles. Her mother struggled with heroin use. We had gun racks in our house, my mom was a drug dealer; my grandma, like my mother, was born in the house of corrections. So it was a big cycle. By age 10, Todd said, she began using alcohol and drugs to manage her emotional pain. Todd was released early from prison to parole, and she got her life together. She completed parole in —though she still had to serve 10 more years on probation—began teaching in the prison where she had served her sentence, published a book, [] and started working for Mothers in Charge, a violence prevention organization.

Supervision officers often warn people that failure to comply with their rules of release can lead to jail. In fact, in many cases, supervision officers know exactly where the people under their supervision live and work, and even arrest them at those locations. In Pennsylvania, nearly 20 percent of all state parole rule violations between and resulted from failing to report; [] in Wisconsin, failure to report and absconding constituted 14 percent of all rule violations during those years. When he was released from the Manitowac jail around June , May was told his probation officer would arrange transport to a treatment program in Milwaukee, he said. Confused and overwhelmed, he explained, he never reported. He got back on track, working jobs at a temp service and as a prep cook, he explained.

Then in August , police arrested May for having a backpack with some marijuana and a BB gun inside, he said. He denied the backpack was his and said he was in the process of returning it to a friend. We also spoke with Jasmine Jackson. In , a Philadelphia court sentenced Jackson to two-to-four years of prison followed by six years of probation for a robbery committed when she was 16 years old. Jackson said that she served three years of her sentence in prison then and one year on parole in a halfway house. She returned home in , and at that point, she told us, she thought her obligation to the state was over.

For about six years, everything went well, Jackson said. Then, in September , someone called the police while she and her then-partner were arguing. It turns out that, after Jackson finished serving her state parole, she was supposed to serve the six years of county probation she was sentenced to when she was a teenager. No one ever told her to report to probation, and she did not realize she had to serve more supervision after completing parole, she said. After being arrested on the probation warrant, Jackson spent three weeks in jail waiting for her revocation hearing, after which the judge revoked her probation and re-sentenced her to two years of probation. She lost her job as a result of the arrest and incarceration, and later, after obtaining another job, she lost that too because she had to continually leave work early to report to her probation officer, she said.

In January , Jackson was arrested for misdemeanor drug possession, which triggered another probation violation. She was sentenced to another year of probation, to be served alongside her other probation term. All they did is hinder me. There is a growing global movement decriminalize the possession of drugs for personal use. Human Rights Watch and the ACLU support this movement as a matter of human rights, because criminalizing personal choices like drug use, in the absence of harm to others, is per se disproportionate and inconsistent with the right to privacy and basic principles of autonomy that underlie all rights.

Moreover, research indicates that frequent drug testing—a common supervision condition—does not reduce drug use. Nevertheless, personal drug use remains a leading driver of incarceration for supervision violations. In Pennsylvania, 17 percent of all state parole rule violations from to resulted from drug possession. If these arrests while on supervision are consistent with national arrest data, then the overwhelming majority of such arrests are for nothing more than possessing drugs for personal use.

Though Black and white people use drugs at similar rates, arrests for drug crimes are more likely to happen in predominantly poor areas composed of people of color—who are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement. In some jurisdictions we examined closely for this report, disparities for marijuana arrests are particularly glaring. In Wisconsin from to , Black people were much more likely than white people to face supervision violations for possessing or using drugs. Human Rights Watch calculated a race-specific rate for the number of people with drug-related violations per 10, people in Wisconsin.

For violations stemming from drug possession offenses, the rate for Black people is 3. When comparing the race proportions of the Wisconsin population with those charged with drug use violations or drug possession offenses, the disparities are just as glaring. In Wisconsin, the proportion of Native Americans sanctioned for drug use violations is over eight times higher than their proportion of the state population; for Black people, it is more than twice their proportion of the population. Given national survey data showing that people of all races and ethnicities use drugs including marijuana at similar rates, [] these racial disparities in supervision violations point to a disproportionate impact on Black people and Native Americans that amounts to prohibited racial discrimination under international human rights law.

Wayne Murphy, 60 years old, is still serving the year probation sentence he was given in Wisconsin for a sexual assault committed in I had no presents or money. Being there would have sent me into a deep depression. A few days later, on December 29, , Murphy spoke with his probation officer and explained why he went to a different house, and clarified that no drugs or alcohol—which would violate his supervision conditions—were involved.

She pursued revocation and lodged a detainer, requiring Murphy to be incarcerated. Murphy spent 36 days in jail waiting for a hearing, and then was sentenced to serve another four days behind bars for the violation, he said. Supervision officers typically have vast discretion to address violations of probation and parole. If a supervision officer pursues revocation, they can lodge a detainer, meaning the individual facing revocation will be detained pending revocation proceedings—which, as discussed below, could be weeks or months.

Basic rights in the US criminal legal system do not apply in revocation proceedings. Further, while criminal charges must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, most states only require supervision violations to be proven by a preponderance of the evidence—meaning more likely than not. Given the lower standards in revocation proceedings, people can—and, in our focus jurisdictions, frequently do [] —face revocation of their supervision for committing new offenses even when they are acquitted of those charges, or the judge dismisses them, in criminal court. Angel Ortiz, a year-old Latino man, grew up in a poor North Philadelphia neighborhood. In , soon after his 18 th birthday, Ortiz was arrested on charges of drug possession with intent to distribute and criminal conspiracy.

In October , while still on probation, Ortiz was convicted of drug possession and sentenced to five to six months in jail. Since then, Philadelphia police have arrested Ortiz multiple times, Ortiz said. On four occasions, he told us, courts dismissed the charges—in some cases because evidence was obtained unlawfully, he said. When we met Ortiz in October , he was still serving the same probation term imposed two decades ago and had three years and nine months more to go.

He told us that he has a steady job at a sanitation company and feels like things are finally coming together. In many jurisdictions, including most of Wisconsin and parts of Georgia and Pennsylvania, people participate in their revocation hearings remotely via videoconference from the jail where they are detained. Videoconferencing creates additional obstacles to contesting revocation.

Lawyers must choose between appearing in the courtroom—where they can speak clearly with the judge and question witnesses—or in the jail with their client, where they can confidentially review strategies and clarify facts. Compared with defendants in criminal proceedings, people facing supervision revocation have limited access to attorneys. In essence, the US Supreme Court has said that courts only need to appoint lawyers for revocation proceedings if someone has claims of innocence, strong mitigating factors, or the case is complicated. Rules and regulations in many states, including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, nevertheless provide a right to counsel in all revocation proceedings.

Yet in the Lowndes County misdemeanor court, access to counsel appears non-existent. Unlike many jurisdictions, which appoint counsel once a revocation petition is filed, in Lowndes County the court waits until the first court appearance—which, as discussed later in this section, often comes after months in detention—to appoint a lawyer. Lowndes County Judge John Edwards told us that he appoints lawyers for anyone facing revocation who wants one.

At their first appearance, people facing revocation speak with the solicitor-general—a prosecutor. This inherent delay incentivizes people to proceed immediately without a lawyer. Even when courts appoint counsel, it may come too late. As described later in this section, supervision officers in Georgia and Wisconsin routinely approach people in jail, sometimes before a lawyer has been appointed, with inducements to forgo their hearing rights. Accordingly, people often make fundamental decisions about their cases without talking to a lawyer. Detainers override any other pre-trial release determination. This means that even if someone on supervision is arrested for a criminal offense and a judge authorizes their release, the person will remain in jail until at least their first revocation proceeding due to the detainer.

In some states, authorities, recognizing there is a problem, have attempted to create alternative systems that reduce the time people spend in custody awaiting their revocation hearings. However, even with these systems, people end up getting arrested and held in custody for significant amounts of time, resulting in job loss and other disruptions. Likewise, in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, certain people on probation and parole are released more quickly from jail through administrative disposition hearings.

Detention pending revocation proceedings is widespread across the United States. These kinds of holds are routine. In , Wisconsin supervision officers ordered nearly 45, holds. Some court officials we spoke to said detainers were justified to protect the public. In many cases, the conduct for which people are detained pending revocation proceedings, such as missing meetings or using drugs, does not raise inherent safety or flight concerns. Even people accused of serious criminal conduct do not necessarily pose a flight risk, and, where those concerns are present, courts will likely detain people pending criminal proceedings in any case, making supervision detainers unnecessary.

People accused of supervision violations may spend anywhere from a few days, to a couple of weeks, to months or even years in jail pending revocation proceedings. In Pennsylvania, there can be a substantial difference in total duration of confinement between people charged with probation rule violations and those charged with probation violations for new offenses: our analysis of data provided by Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, reveals that the former are incarcerated for a median of 23 days pending sentencing while the latter are locked up for a median of 57 days pending sentencing.

Lengths of detention pending an initial hearing in Pennsylvania vary across the state. According to a Philadelphia Inquirer analysis, while Philadelphia County generally holds preliminary revocation hearings discussed below in this section within ten days of detention, [] people in nearby Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and Dauphin County, which contains Harrisburg, regularly wait up to 90 days for their first hearing.

According to data provided to Human Rights Watch by the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, Wisconsin detained people pending investigation into alleged supervision violations for between five and 59 days more than 14, times between and Attorneys who regularly represent people facing revocation in Georgia told us that, in Chatham County, of which Savannah is a part, people wait between 45 and 90 days for a hearing. Total detention periods can be particularly long for people facing both revocation and new criminal charges at the same time. A JFA Institute analysis of the Dane County, Wisconsin, jail, which contains Madison, revealed that people locked up on detainers spent an average of 44 days in jail, while those incarcerated on detainers and new charges spent an average of 97 days in jail.

Public defenders explained that these individuals are stuck in a catch But admitting to the violation, and potentially getting out of jail, puts them in a poor position to challenge the criminal case. Resolving the criminal case first, however, generally takes longer, meaning more time in jail. The result is often months in detention as lawyers try to coordinate a joint resolution of the revocation and criminal proceedings. For instance, when we met Darius Hill pseudonym at the Chatham County, Georgia, jail in December , he had already been incarcerated for over ten months. When we spoke to Hill, his next court hearing was not for another three months. Court and supervision officials generally blamed lengthy detention on overburdened court calendars and under-resourced staff, and expressed concern about these lengthy detention periods.

Once detained, people have little opportunity to seek release. We found this to be the case in our focus states. For example, of the nearly 9, preliminary state parole violation hearings scheduled in Pennsylvania between and , 78 percent were waived, according to data provided to Human Rights Watch by the Pennsylvania Department of Probation and Parole PBPP. Multiple factors contribute to the low number of preliminary hearings. For instance, in Wisconsin and Georgia, if an individual admits that they violated their supervision conditions, whether by breaking a rule or committing a new crime, they do not have the right to a preliminary hearing.

Officials justify the policies described above on the grounds that, if someone admits to violating their supervision rules or a court finds probable cause of a crime, probable cause is established for the alleged violations. Yet preliminary hearings serve also to determine whether—regardless of probable cause—there is sufficient justification to hold the individual pending a final revocation hearing rather than allow them to be out of custody during this period.

Such policies leave individuals in the position of having no formal mechanism to challenge their sometimes months or more of incarceration before their final revocation hearing. Further, lengthy detention often pushes people to waive their preliminary hearing rights. Public defenders told us that, after spending weeks or months in jail, many people waive their right to a preliminary hearing in exchange for either a shorter sentence or release with time served.

Low pay is an ongoing frustration for probation officers, whose paychecks don't reflect how long they actually stay on the job. Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, paperwork, travel and job requirements keep probation officers working past a normal full-time schedule. For example, many agencies rotate on-call positions, which requires the officer's hour availability to handle emergencies, the bureau reports. Probation officers are often required to work in high crime areas, institutions or hostile environments.

According to a survey by the National Institute of Justice , a sub-agency of the U. Justice Department, 39 to 55 percent of officers in four states experienced work-related violence, or threats. Many offenders also suffer from substance abuse problems that make them willing to use violence. As a result, offenders must frequently carry firearms to protect themselves.