This article examines the practice of probation agencies assigning offenders with mental illness to smaller specialty caseloads; it seeks to determine whether a prototypical specialty agency was different from a traditional agency in officers’ practices, and probationers’ treatment access and rule violations, via multi-method, longitudinal matched trial.
Many probation agencies in the United States assign offenders with mental illness to relatively small specialty caseloads supervised by officers with relevant training, rather than to large general caseloads. Specialty caseloads are designed to improve the process and outcomes of probation, largely by linking these probationers with psychiatric treatment and avoiding unnecessary violations. In this multi-method, longitudinal matched trial, the authors tested whether a prototypical specialty agency differed from a traditional agency in officers’ practices, probationers’ treatment access, and probationers’ rule violations. The specialty agency yielded the following: significantly better officer practices; greater rates of treatment involvement; and lower rates of violation reports than the traditional agency. Additionally, officers’ use of sanctions and threats increased probationers’ risk of incurring a probation violation, whereas high-quality officer-probationer relationships protected against this outcome. When implemented with fidelity, specialty mental health caseloads improved the supervision process for this high-need group. [Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 38(5) of Law and Human Behavior (see record 2014-40892-001). There were errors in Table 1. The corrected table is presented in the correction.] Publisher Abstract Provided