Suchergebnisse

Offenders with a substance abuse diagnosis are often ordered to participate in treatment. However, little is known about how offenders perceive this mandate or how the criminal justice system should be involved. The procedural justice orientation suggests that offenders who view the mandate as legitimate and useful will be more likely to comply. In-depth interviews with probationers and parolees are analyzed to explore this issue. Overall, offenders held conflicting opinions about the mandate to attend treatment. Although offenders disliked being ordered to complete drug treatment, they understood the benefit of attending as a part of their reintegration and sobriety. Offenders felt their supervising officers were fair, but their role in drug treatment was to ensure program completion. This study adds to the literature by providing insight into offender perceptions of mandated treatment and the dimensions of the offender–officer relationship. Implications for procedural justice, future research, and policy are discussed.

For over half a century scholars have considered the "bureaucratic personality" (Merton 1940), a concept synonymous with rigid rule following to overcome organizational alienation and powerlessness among workers. Recently, scholars have introduced the "unbureaucratic personality" (DeHart-Davis, 2007) or "unbureaucratic behavior" (Brockmann, 2017). In this paper, we use both concepts to explore how probation officers and frontline supervisors experience work in one Mid-Atlantic state. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and focus group data, we contend that lack of voice and buy-in for organizational change frames bureaucratic or unbureaucratic behavior in important ways. We argue that, despite participants holding unbureaucratic personality traits, organizational structure and culture in this agency more often shapes frontline workers' bureaucratic behavior, even in the face of organizational reform. When staff exhibit unbureaucratic behavior it appears as a coping mechanism for the rapid, and sometimes, ill-defined or unsupported changes. While normative judgments regarding bureaucratic or unbureaucratic behavior are important, they are often in the eye of the beholder. Here, we extend the concepts of bureaucratic and unbureaucratic behavior to a criminal justice setting, allowing readers to judge the normative implications for themselves.

AbstractThe stigma associated with a felony conviction can impede the reentry process, and emerging research findings indicate that one's community can amplify or temper the mark of a criminal record. Researchers examining criminal stigma have focused on individuals living in urban areas, overlooking the experiences of persons outside these communities. Using qualitative data collected from a sample of men and women paroled for sexual offenses in Missouri, we contrast how social and structural stigma alter the reentry experiences for participants living in communities along the rural and urban continuum. The results show that the stigma of a sex offense conviction was a near‐universal experience and residence restrictions stymied efforts to find housing. Residents of urban areas and some large cities felt that the community offered relative anonymity from stigma but the stress of their status being discovered was omnipresent. Participants in rural areas and small cities had less social privacy and reported being shunned in the community, although strong social ties did mitigate some of the consequences of stigma. The results highlight the importance of considering place when studying reentry and have implications for designing correctional policies to address the needs of residents returning to non–metropolitan locations.

Frontline supervisors serve in a critical role, maintaining relationships between upper management and frontline workers; however, we still know relatively little about how subordinates view their power in relation to their supervisors and how frontline supervisors understand and exercise their own power. Focusing on street‐level workers and frontline supervisors across a statewide community corrections agency, we explore perceptions, experiences, and assertions of power in the workplace. Using focus groups with thirty‐two street‐level probation and parole officers and focus groups and field observations of seventy‐five frontline supervisors, we find that officers and frontline supervisors have widely differing views on the power of the frontline supervisory position, some of which are influenced by gender. While street‐level workers align frontline supervisors with policy creators, frontline supervisors view themselves as disempowered go‐betweens. Frontline supervisors compensate for their perceived lack of power in policymaking and implementation by using micropower strategies to assert their power. This study extends street‐level bureaucrat theory to the role of frontline supervisors, who in practice are distant from the upper management roles with which they are typically categorized.

AbstractMonetary sanctions can expand the scope and depth of punishment. Most research on monetary sanctions has centered on fines and fees assessed by the court, but they are also routinely imposed as part of the probation and parole sentence. In this article, we draw on in‐depth interview data from a sample of individuals under correctional supervision to document the often hidden costs of correctional control. We further consider a subsample of participants convicted of sexual offenses to illustrate the unique way that monetary sanctions are levied on groups of people who are considered more morally culpable and worthy of carceral control. We find that monetary sanctions are regularly assessed and challenging for most participants. The stigma of a sexual offense conviction and economic precarity, particularly among Black members of the sample, further the costs of punishment. We contend that costs associated with a sexual offense are unique because they can continue in perpetuity, govern normative behavior, and are centered on an assumption of continued guilt. We argue that the monetary sanctions levied against convicted persons, especially individuals with sexual offenses, demonstrate the often hidden and expansive nature of carceral control for other marginalized groups.

How can evidence-based skills and practices reduce re-offending, support desistance, and encourage service user engagement during supervision in criminal justice settings? How can those who work with service users in these settings apply these skills and practices? This book is the first to bring together international research on skills and practices in probation and youth justice, while exploring the wider contexts that affect their implementation in the public, private and voluntary sectors. Wide-ranging in scope, it also covers effective approaches to working with diverse groups such as ethnic minority service users, women and young people