What and Who Might Enhance Offender Compliance: Situating Responsibilities

Abstract

Recent legislative interest in decarceration (Gartner et al. 2011) and spiralling costs of incarceration have led to community corrections enjoying a kind of renaissance. Indeed, various researchers have implemented empirically informed training and intervention strategies that are changing probation policy and practice. To a large extent, the focus of such training is to give probation staff the necessary skills to better manage their face to face contacts with their clientele beyond a simple check-in and review of supervision conditions. This recent evolution in probation practice has yielded modest but replicable reductions in probation failures (i.e. breaches for technical violations and rates of reoffending (Bonta et al. 2008; Robinson et al. 2011) and has been described as core correctional practice (Dowden and Andrews 2004).