Law Advice

“Improving Probationer Compliance Through Swift and Certain Sanctions: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial of HOPE Probation” Our justice system has a poor track record of supervising drug-involved criminal justice offenders. With inconsistent punishments and long delays between the violation and the punishment, the supervision system has fostered low levels of compliance and is ineffective in reducing rates of drug use and reoffending. Rather than consistently sanctioning probation violations – illegal drug use, missing probation appointments and drug tests, missing required drug-treatment sessions – probation officers and courts typically allow repeated violations to go unpunished. When punishments are meted out, they tend to be lengthy (and costly) jail terms. There are strong theoretical reasons to think that a probation system that consistently and swiftly punishes probation violations and uses mild rather than drastic sanctions would be more effective in inducing behavioral changes than the current much more haphazard system. In this presentation, Dr Hawken will present findings from the randomized controlled trial she is leading, to test a structured sanctions model in Hawaii. The program, called HOPE (Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement) uses swift and certain, but modest sanctions to manage drug offenders.&nb! sp; HOPE has dramatically improved probationer compliance without draining department resources. The evaluation of HOPE has important …