Project Overview

In 2014, Abt Associates began work on a grant from the National Institute of Justice to describe the varying home and field contact practices in community supervision and evaluate their effectiveness in maintaining public safety and promoting compliance with supervision requirements. Our study team partnered with the American Probation and Parole Association (APPA) to identify possible survey participants and to assist in developing questions for a web-based survey. We disseminated the survey to various departments of community correction, parole authorities, and parallel probation agencies across the country. The survey questions were designed to obtain information about topics related to agencies’ supervision contact standard policies, firearms policy and practices, peace officer status of community supervision officers, and whether community supervision officers conduct field visits with escorts from other law enforcement agencies. We received 301 responses from 181 local level and 120 state level agencies. All fifty states are represented in the sample. Agencies that supervise offenders are organized differently in each state: in some states, policies may vary by region or district, where others are centralized at the state level. To get a complete picture of the variation in each state and regions within the state, we have included responses from state-level agencies as well as regional or district executives. We have made efforts to present data that represents the breadth of policies within each jurisdiction rather than restrict responses to only the highest level respondent.

The project described here was supported by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, under grant number 2013-IJ-CX-0103 awarded to Abt Associates. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Department of Justice.