Everything That Is Old Is New Again—Old Again—New Again . . .

This essay is first and foremost a reflective piece on the first author’s involvement in community corrections policy and practice over the past 44 years. While my line staff, supervisory, and senior administrative practitioner experiences spanned 30 years in the State of New Jersey, my perspective is national. I have provided, and continue to engage in, countless training workshops, consulting, technical assistance, and conference talks. Over the course of these 44 years, I have personally visited and interacted with community corrections practitioners in all but four states. Let me say at the outset that I have encountered some excellent examples of probation and parole agencies providing robust evidence-based principles grounded in the “what works” school of thought. Unfortunately, I have countenanced many more practitioners and policy makers who lack even a superficial understanding of principles for effective intervention, and who identify more with exclusively police-like law enforcement professional orientations than with the kind of professional orientations needed to successfully reintegrate offenders into families, neighborhoods, and communities.

My observations of community corrections in practice as recently a few months ago, for example, affirm my belief that the last frontier of implementing the principles of the “what works” school of thought into everyday practice is with the street-level bureaucrats who do the work—primarily probation and parole officers (Paparozzi & Schlager, 2009). Too little attention has been paid to the values possessed by these individuals. For example, do they believe that offenders can be changed from anti-social to pro-social more often than not? If so, is it appropriate to provide assistance to people who have victimized individuals and society? Do they believe that redemption and forgiveness should be at the ideological heart of correctional practice? Do they understand that the many components of the criminal justice system strive to achieve public safety and justice for all, but that each of the various components of the criminal justice system has specific methods for doing so? Do they understand that public safety is, and always has been, the primary goal of probation, parole, and community corrections, and that offender rehabilitation is the evidence-based strategy that provides the most promise for achieving this most prized long-term goal? Do they understand that probation and parole systems attempt to maximize public safety through short-term risk management and long-term behavioral reform? Do they understand that probation and parole officers are not solely either case workers/managers or law enforcers, but a blend of both? These are critical questions when making initial hiring decisions and developing staff development programs.

To maximize the possibility for offender recidivism reduction (aka enhancing public safety) in an evidence-based paradigm, probation and parole officers are expected to identify criminogenic needs of offenders, develop case plans that target those criminogenic needs, and deliver or coordinate the delivery of appropriate and high-quality services that adhere to evidence-based principles and practices. At the same time, probation and parole officers are also expected to monitor an offender’s progress in the treatment plan previously developed, engage with service providers as part of a case management team, and modify the case management plan if needed to help the offender succeed. Finally, probation and parole officers face the critical task of making decisions to incarcerate offenders under supervision when they are believed to be a danger to themselves and/or the public.

To accomplish all of the foregoing, probation and parole officers must engage in social work and law enforcement functions. The question of whether one person should and can effectively carry out both roles has been around for quite a while, and it remains somewhat unresolved even now (Clear & O’Leary, 1983; Clear & Latessa, 1993; Dembo, 1972; Duffee, 1975; Fulton, Stichman, Travis, & Latessa, 1997; Katz, 1982). In my view, one individual can and should perform both functions effectively. Moreover, when he or she does so, there are better recidivism reduction outcomes than when a probation/parole officer adopts one or the other of the two roles (Paparozzi & Gendreau, 2005).

Frequently, probation and parole agencies seek to change the emphasis on probation and parole supervision from treatment to law enforcement or vice versa. When the message is more toward rehabilitation, there are frequently only loose discussions about evidence-based practices. I recently addressed a group of approximately 200 probation and parole officers in the East who work in an agency, like many others, which touts its adoption of evidence-based practices to satisfy the objectives of the justice reinvestment model (Clement, Schwarzfeld, & Thompson, 2011). When I asked line staff and senior administrators which evidence-based practices are being practiced, the response was “risk assessment.” When pressed a bit further about the nature of static and dynamic factors and their relationship to criminogenic needs, case planning, and the quality of services being provided to offenders, they were unable to provide explanations or additional information. I had a similar experience in 2016 while addressing probation and parole officers in the Midwest and another with an agency in the West.

Paparozzi and DeMichele (2008) laid out a model for the doing of probation and parole as follows: Treatment + Surveillance + Enforcement = Probation and Parole. The temporal ordering is intentional and imperative. In fact, this is the model that I first learned about in the daily practice of my work as a parole officer trainee starting on February 6, 1973, in Newark, New Jersey.

Unfortunately, from my perspective, in those early years of my tenure in the profession, the over-emphasis on treatment and the virtually nonexistent emphasis on surveillance and enforcement resulted in the inability to fully implement probation and parole. During those early years, my District Parole Supervisor (DPS), Lee Patterson, would stress the need to provide services to individuals under supervision and to avoid pursuing technical violations at all costs. So, refer for services we did—not unlike current practice under the newly discovered reentry and justice reinvestment paradigms.

As has been and continues to be the case in most probation and parole jurisdictions, there has never been a sufficient number of treatment and service delivery programs to meet the needs of all of the offenders who needed them. Moreover, the therapeutic integrity of treatment and service delivery programs was/is unknown or questionable, as was/is the effectiveness of service delivery programs to which offenders were referred and required to attend.

In fact, in the latest iteration of probation and parole as an evidence-based offender rehabilitation service, line staff are generally more focused on demanding that offenders under supervision participate in programs to which they are referred rather than assuring the quality or appropriateness of the services rendered. What has changed of late is that offenders are given more chances to comply with supervision conditions imposed on them. Is this a new turn of events in the profession? I recall the prominence of this same model for doing business in the early 1970s.

Since my DPS would rarely agree to sign off on technical violations, the result was that our district had the lowest recidivism rate in the state. This was in spite of the fact that our district had the highest crime rate, high school drop-out rate, and unemployment rate in the entire state. This point is worth mentioning because it reveals how the professional orientation of one person can have dramatic effects on success and failure rates of offenders while under supervision. It cannot be disputed that evidence-based principles, or non-evidence-based principles, are always filtered through the values and professional orientation of line staff (Whetzel, Paparozzi, Alexander, & Lowenkamp, 2011).

In July 2017, the Public Broadcasting System’s Frontline program aired a documentary involving parole in the State of Connecticut (O’Neil, 2017). This documentary provided a picture of parole practices under the new evidence-based/offender rehabilitation paradigm. The interactions between parole officers and offenders did emphasize a return to trying to avoid technical violations in favor of providing parolees with opportunities to remain “on the streets” and keep trying to change their errant ways. However, consistent with my observations over the years, the matters of quality of services (Lowenkamp, Latessa, & Smith, 2006), responsivity (Andrews & Bonta, 2006), and the relevance of therapeutic alliance in the case management process (Blasko, Friedmann, Giuranna Rhodes, & Taxman, 2015; Polaschek & Ross, 2010; Skeem, Eno Louden, Polaschek, & Camp, 2007), as they relate to an offender’s success or failure while under supervision, were conspicuously absent.

The parole officers in the documentary gave the appearance of law enforcement officers. Their shirts displayed embroidered badges, and they prominently displayed handcuffs, ammunition pouches, and pistols. Similarly, I recently became aware of a parole agency that changed the titles of supervisors to captain, lieutenant, and sergeant. Another example that comes to mind relates to a visit to a community-based program for parolees in 2017; I witnessed three parole officers come into the facility and arrest a parolee who had not complied with the rules of the program. The parole officers could easily have been mistaken for commandos by dint of their dress and mannerisms. During a visit to another probation/parole agency in 2015, I sat next to a probation and parole officer who was wearing a large Glock pistol. I asked him about the gun, and he replied that as his agency is now taking probation and parole more seriously, all officers are armed. He was quick to mention that he engages in evidence-based practices like assuring that the offenders under his supervision comply with the conditions of their release. While I unequivocally support the arming of probation and parole officers, I do not support their transformation into police officers—They are first and foremost probation and parole officers.

In the Connecticut documentary mentioned earlier (O’Neil, 2017), Fiona Dougherty, a Yale Law School professor, made a profound comment. She said that

. . . the key to reforming the parole system in Connecticut is changing the dynamics of the invisible meetings that happen all over the state between parolees and their parole officers. If the atmosphere in those rooms is reflective of the reform vision of the top, then change in Connecticut will happen. And if it’s not, it will be very hard to make change stick.

When I began my career as a parole officer trainee on February 6, 1973, I was overcome with gratitude for having obtained some sort of professional employment. The feeling of achievement was overwhelming. My undergraduate degree in sociology provided me with little to no foundation about criminal justice, in general, or community corrections in particular. Nevertheless, I was determined to learn and to become the best parole officer that I could be.

In reflecting on what has and what has not changed in the profession over the past 40 years, I am struck by the cyclical changes that have occurred largely due to shifting political ideologies and the economy as opposed to research evidence and sound theory. It seems that the phrase “everything that is old is new again” best describes my observations.

In fact, the vision of parole as a criminal justice function supporting the successful community reintegration of offenders, transitioning from incarceration to community, in its broadest sense, was pervasive long before I started my career in the 1970s (Chute, 1937; Dressler, 1959; Parsons, 1940; Wilson, 1941; Witte, 1941). That we returned to an interest in reentry at the beginning of the millenium (Travis, Solomon, Waul, 2001), as if we had just discovered a new professional paradigm, is naïve, and it highlights the lack of a professional stream of thought within the profession.

As with so many paradigmatic shifts within the probation and parole profession, the latest return to trying to “work with offenders while on the street” is likely driven much more by increased correctional costs related to prison construction and operation coupled with severe economic downturns in the United States (Petersilia, 2002, 2006) than with the recognition that the research evidence revealed in the “what works” literature is the best path to public safety through offender recidivism reduction.

As previously noted, the community corrections component of the criminal justice system is expected to enhance public safety by managing offender risk in the short-term and changing offender behavior in the long term (Cullen & Gendreau, 2000; Wodahl & Garland, 2009). However, many “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky, 1980) primarily define their jobs as follows:

Unreservedly enforcing conditions of probation and/or parole—whatever they are.

Making and documenting the required number of office, home, and community contacts.

Writing reports for the court and/or paroling authority.

Incarcerating technical violators.

All of the foregoing functions are, in my experience, all too common.

Andrews and Bonta (2010), Trotter (2006), and Skeem et al. (2007) all note that when the enforcement function is highly valued by line staff, establishing a positive working relationship with the offender and effectively implementing evidence-based programs for offender rehabilitation are obstructed. This sentiment is consistent with the literature on the importance of therapeutic alliance to successful correctional outcomes (Blasko et al., 2015; Polaschek & Ross, 2010; Skeem et al., 2007).

The question for the profession is this: Do we have the right people in the right positions to do the difficult, but surely not impossible, balancing of case management and enforcement?

We have learned quite a lot in the past 40 years about “what works.” We have learned very little about the impact that the professional orientation of practitioners at all levels of probation and parole organizations have on doing “what works.” Unless more attention is paid to who populates the profession, makes its policies, and administers its organizations, full implementation of the “what works” agenda will be nearly impossible.