Publications
“Criminal Justice System Flowchart.” Bureau of Justice Statistics. http://www.bjs.gov/content/largechart.cfm.
The flowchart of the events in the criminal justice system (shown in the diagram) updates the original chart prepared by the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice in 1967. The chart summarizes the most common events in the criminal and juvenile justice systems including entry into the criminal justice system, prosecution and pretrial services, adjudication, sentencing and sanctions, and corrections. A discussion of the events in the criminal justice system follows.
Miller, Joel. “Contemporary Modes of Probation Officer Supervision: The Triumph of the ‘Synthetic’ Officer?” Taylor & Francis. Justice Quarterly Volume 32 - Issue 2, March 12, 2013. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07418825.2013.770546?journalCode=rjqy20.
This article considers the continued relevance of law enforcement and social worker roles to probation officer practice, a central motif in community corrections scholarship. It also considers how these traditional functions are integrated into community-oriented supervision practices, increasingly emphasized in policy circles. Using Latent Class Analysis of data from a national community corrections survey, a four-class typology of probation officers was developed, based on their supervision practices. While classes vary according to the intensity of supervision, particularly in the engagement of third parties (family, community, and the police), there are no classes that correspond either to law enforcers or to social workers. Rather, officer classes are all “synthetic”—combining law enforcement and social work functions together in the same strategy. The analysis identifies a number of predictors of membership in more intensive supervision classes. These relate to ideological orientations, caseload characteristics, officer demographics, and agency progressiveness.
The rapid and intractable growth of community supervision populations in a decades-long punitive era undermined the traditional rehabilitative ideal and ushered in competing visions of what constituted appropriate supervision (Phelps, in press; Simon, 1993). Although allegiance to human service supervision never vanished, many jurisdictions deemphasized behavior change through treatment in favor of risk management through a range of control- or deterrence-oriented approaches. These included the trumpeting of such practices as intensive supervision, drug testing, electronic monitoring, and, more recently, swift-certain-fair probation. With only occasional exceptions, these practices have proven to be ineffective or, at best, inconsistently and modestly successful (Cullen & Jonson, 2017; Cullen, Pratt, Turanovic, & Butler, in press; Petersilia & Turner, 1993; Schaefer, Cullen, & Eck, 2016) Ramezani, Niloofar, Bhati, Avi, Murphy, Amy, Routh, Douglas, and Faye S. Taxman. "Reinventing Community Corrections." Health and Justice Journal. June 9, 2022. https://healthandjusticejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40352-022-00182-w.
This article discusses fidelity scales from the RNR Program Tool and provides guidance on the importance of tool development processes to ensure accurate, valid, and reliable scales. The purpose of the RNR Program Tool is to create a modern, online tool integrating both the empirical (research) literature on effective practices and clinical standards on quality programming. This process minimizes the need for consultants by giving program administrators the ability to gather information on their programs, score them, and receive instant and targeted feedback with recommendations for improvement to assess their programs against empirical standards in the field. Furthermore, it provides a standardized tool that administrators can use to examine what type of individuals fare better in their programs. The provided targeted feedback can give the programs the ability to seek technical assistance or guidance in specific areas that can strategically strengthen their program.