Making It: Supervision in the Community

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Making It: Supervision in the Community

CHAPTER OUTLINE

I.  Introduction

A.  Returning to the streets after years behind bars is a shock.

1.  Most normal events take on overwhelming significance.

2.  Many people assume once an offender has served his time, he has paid his debt to society.

3.  However, the vast majority of offenders released from prison remain subject to correctional control.

4.  The former inmate has many obstacles to overcome: time away from friends and family, legal limitations on employment, and the suspicions of the community.

5.  No truly clean start is possible, and the outside world can be alien and unpredictable.

B.  Community Supervision

1.  Restrictions on parolees are rationalized on the grounds that people who have been incarcerated must readjust to the community gradually so that they will not simply fall back into preconviction habits and associations.

2.  With little preparation offenders move from the highly structured, authoritarian prison life into the complex, temptation-filled free world.

3.  They are expected to summon extraordinary coping abilities; not surprisingly, the social, psychological, and material overload sends many parolees back.

4.  Today, most prisoners are not prepared for their entrance into the community.

5.  Reentry problems help explain why most parole failures occur soon after release-nearly one quarter during the first six months.

C.  Revocation

1.  When people fail on parole, their parolee status is revoked and they return to prison to continue serving their sentences.

2.  Parole can be revoked for 2 reasons: committing a new crime or violating the conditions of parole (technical violation).

3.  Most revocations occur only when the parolee is arrested on a serious charge or cannot be located by the officer.

4.  When a parole officer wants to revoke parole, the U.S. Supreme Court requires a two-stage revocation proceeding.

5.  In the first stage, the parole board determines whether there is probable cause that a violation has occurred. The parolee then has the right to be notified of the charges, be informed of evidence, be heard, present witnesses, and confront the parole board witnesses.

6.  In the second stage, the parole board decides if the violation is severe enough to warrant return to prison.

7.  Nationally, 35 percent of all new prison admissions are parole violators (Figure 16.4).

II.  The Structure of Community Supervision

A.  Three forces influence the newly released offender’s adjustment to free society.

1.  The parole officer

2.  The parole bureaucracy

3.  The experiences of the offender

4.  Supervision can be viewed as a series of stages in which attachments develop (Figure 16.5).

B.  Agents of Community Supervision: The parole officers are asked to play 2 roles: cop and social worker.

1.  As cops they can restrict many aspects of the parolee’s life, enforce conditions of release, and initiate revocation for violations.

2.  As social workers they are responsible for assisting parolee’s adjustment to the community.

C.  Glaser divided officers along the two dimensions of assistance and control and yielded four conceptions of parole work.

1.  Paternal officers protect both the offender and community by means of assistance, lectures, praise, and blame.

2.  Punitive officers are guardians of middle-class morality and attempt to bring the offender into conformity by threats and punishments.

3.  Welfare workers want the greater good of their clients and they help the clients’ individual adjustment toward that end.

4.  Passive agents see their jobs as secure and expend only minimal energy.

5.  The parole officer’s style has been referred to as one of the two hidden conditions of supervision.

6.  The second hidden condition is the supervision plan, in which the officer had a great deal of discretion when developing this plan.

D.  The Community Supervision Bureaucracy: Parole officers do not work in a vacuum; they face limits on the approaches they can take to cases and those limits derive from specific needs of managing a work load that exceeds available time and general needs to respond to organizational philosophies and policies.

1.  Work load – Lipsky points out that the difficulties faced by many clients of human services are so complex that “the job…is in a sense impossible to do in ideal terms.”

2.  The caseload affects how often an officer can contact each parolee and how much help can be given.

3.  Parole officers spend as much as 80 percent of their time at non-supervisory work.

4.  Philosophy and Policy: In the end, it’s the emphasis on “control” that matters most in the philosophy of an agency.

5.  Constraints on Officer’s Authority: Parole officers in using discretion, balance many constraints, though they are often portrayed as having absolute authority over their clients.

6.  Parole officers perform their jobs in ways that maintain office norms without threatening their co-workers.

7.  The parole bureaucracy is a force in the offender’s post-release experience in several ways.

III.  Residential Programs

A.  These serve offenders when they are first released from prison; most house a limited number of offenders at any one time.

1.  They are often referred to as community correctional centers.

2.  They usually provide counseling, drug treatment and impose strict curfews on residents when they are not working.

B.  Residential centers face many problems.

1.  High staff-resident ratios

2.  High operating expenses

3.  Some have high failure rates.

4.  Many are not welcomed in their communities.

C.  The most common type of community correctional center is the halfway house, or work release center.

1.  Two kinds of work release programs are available: In the most secure, prisoners work during the day (often in groups) and then return at night to a group housing unit.

2.  Work furlough is where offenders work and live at home during the week and return to the prison for the weekend.

D.  Effectiveness of community correctional centers

1.  The earliest studies of residential release programs tended to find that these offenders performed slightly worse on parole and had higher rates of return to prison than those given regular parole supervision did.

2.  Other studies had shown that arrest rates for work release inmates were quite low.

3.  However, there is no consistent evidence that work centers really work.

IV.  The Offender’s Experience of Post-release Life

A.  The Strangeness of Reentry

1.  Release from prison can be euphoric but also a letdown.

2.  Everyone has changed, as has the parolee.

3.  Initial attempts to restore old ties can be threatening and disappointing.

4.  Freedom is now an unfamiliar environment; routine decision-making skills atrophy.

B.  Supervision and Surveillance

1.  Most offenders released from prison are far from free.

2.  They must report to a parole officer and undergo community supervision until their full sentence has been completed.

3.  People who provide the supervision define their work as “support” but the person released may not view the officer as supportive.

C.  The Problem of Unmet Personal Needs: parolees have very practical concerns: education, money, and job tend to top the list, but their thinking about how to meet those needs isn’t always realistic.

D.  Barriers to Success—Soon after release, offenders learn that they have an in-between status: they are back in society but not totally free.

1.  Civil disabilities—the right to vote and to hold public office are two civil rights limited upon conviction. They also face barriers to public assistance and food stamps, public housing, driver’s licenses, adoptions and foster care, and access to student loans.

2.  Employment—barriers are both formal and informal; the effect of statutory and informal discrimination must be added to many offenders’ unrealistic expectation for employment. Additionally, prisoners are barred from some jobs that they have been trained to do in prison.

3.  Expungement of their criminal record is the only real solution. It is difficult to do.

4.  Pardons are executive acts of clemency that effectively excuse the offender from suffering the consequences of conviction for a criminal act.

V.  The Parolee as “Dangerous”

A.  California parolee Richard Allen Davis committed the brutal murder of12-year-old Polly Klaas which spurred a national movement toward life sentences for third time felons.

B.  The rape and murder of a 4-year-old Megan Kanka by a paroled sex offender led to a series of “sex-offender notification” laws, called “Megan’s Law.”

C.  Repeat violence fuels a public perception that parolees represent an ongoing threat to the public welfare.

D.  Research finds that notification laws seem to have heightened public discomfort about ex-prisoner by calling more attention to the problem. Ex-prisoners face problems as a consequence of notification, including ostracism, being evicted and losing a job.

VI.  The Elements of Successful Reentry

A.  Prison is a harsh enough experience that it would seem unlikely that most who are allowed to leave would eventually return.

B.  Four adjustment supports that are necessary to successful reentry.

1.  Getting substance abuse under control

2.  Getting a job

3.  Getting a community support system

4.  Getting a new sense of “who I am”

C.  Some argue that failure is best understood as a relapse process.

VII.  Postrelease Supervision

A.  How Effective Is It?

1.  Recidivism means different things to different people; rates vary from 5-50% depending on the event; the duration of the period in which the measurement is made and the seriousness of the behavior.

2.  Typically an analysis of recidivism is based on rearrest or reimprisonment for either another felony conviction or a parole violation for up to three years after release.

3.  An important strategy for improving supervision effectiveness is case management.

4.  Carefully monitored classification, case planning, and systematic officer performance appraisal helps parolees fare better in terms of criminal behavior and social adjustment.

5.  “In vivo treatment” system of supervision for drug-involved parolees provides tangible services with close monitoring of progress.

6.  The effectiveness has earned mixed reviews.

B.  What Are Its Prospects?

1.  Even states that have altered release laws or policies seem to recognize that offenders need some help or control in the months after release;

2.  Research suggests that parole helps them stay crime free, at least during the early months on the outside.

3.  The broad discretionary power of the parole officer is disappearing.

4.  In its place a much more restrictive effort is gaining support in which conditions are imposed and strictly enforced.

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