Innovations for community probation services

Reentry represents a critical juncture in the criminal justice pipeline. We partnered with ACPD and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to evaluate a series of innovative strategies designed to reduce recidivism among high-risk clients returning from state prison. In the process, we found a simple, low-cost intervention with significant positive outcomes that could be replicated in probation departments across the county. 

We run a field experiment with ACPD and find that a collaborative model of post-release community supervision - which emphasizes pre-release planning, prioritizes the officer-client relationship, and invites the client to actively participate in their reentry process - is more effective than the traditional model of probation. In fact, clients assigned to the collaborative model were 17 percentage points more likely than the control group to report to their first probation meeting within the required 48 hours following release. In the longer-term, we found that intervention clients are 14 percentage points less likely to have their probation revoked during the year following release, relative to those assigned to the traditional probation model. 

Switching from a traditional top-down model may be challenging for cash-strapped departments around the country. However, our estimate of the long-term impact of a more collaborative case-planning approach on post-release supervision success rates provides compelling evidence that it is likely to be worthwhile.