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Introducing instruments to structure risk assessment has been shown to improve agreement between probation professionals about the assessment of offenders’ risks and needs. The subsequent decisions about intervention plans, however, are to a large extent still unstructured. This article addresses the question of whether probation officers agree about intervention plans and whether agreement differs between experienced and less experienced probation officers. A group of 44 Dutch probation officers wrote intervention plans for four cases in which the risk and needs assessment was given. Results showed that the overall agreement about the intervention plan is poor. Looking at the different domains of an intervention plan, agreement about the advice on the sanction, conditions, criminogenic needs to be addressed, and programs is fair. On all other domains (instructions, control, intensity of supervision, and goals), agreement is poor. Experience of the probation officers did not influence the agreement about the intervention plans substantially.

A previous review of research on the practice of offender supervision identified the predominant use of interview-based methodologies and limited use of other research approaches (Robinson and Svensson, 2013). It also found that most research has tended to be locally focussed (i.e. limited to one jurisdiction) with very few comparative studies. This article reports on the application of a visual method in a small-scale comparative study. Practitioners in five European countries participated and took photographs of the places and spaces where offender supervision occurs. The aims of the study were two-fold: firstly to explore the utility of a visual approach in a comparative context; and secondly to provide an initial visual account of the environment in which offender supervision takes place. In this article we address the first of these aims. We describe the application of the method in some depth before addressing its strengths and weaknesses. We conclude that visual methods provide a useful tool for capturing data about the environments in which offender supervision takes place and potentially provide a basis for more normative explorations about the practices of offender supervision in comparative contexts.

In this article we report a study into the Dutch probation service about the question whether structured decision making about case management plans does or does not improve the quality of these plans, and subsequently improves the effectiveness of offender supervision. Two samples of nearly 300 case management plans each were compared. In the first sample a tool for risk/needs assessment was used to assess the risks and needs but decision making about the subsequent case management plan was not structured (RISc2-sample). In the second sample professionals used the same tool for risk and needs assessment but now it also contained a section for structured decision making about the case management plan (RISc3-sample). Results showed that in the RISc3-sample the quality of the plans was significantly better than in the RISc2-sample: a better match between criminogenic needs and goals, a better match between goals of the offender and goals in the plan, 1 Author Note: We thank the probation services in The Netherlands for supporting this research. We thank Jan Bogaard for supplying the databases for the samples, and Barbara Keuning, Karien Rijnen, and Ada Andreas for their help in clustering and coding the goals and interventions. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article.

Reliability in decision making about intervention plans is a necessary condition for evidence-based probation work and equal treatment of offenders. Structuring decision making can improve agreement between clinical decision makers. In a former study however, we found that in Dutch probation practice structured risk and needs assessment did not result in acceptable agreement about intervention plans. The Dutch probation services subsequently introduced a tool for support in decision making on intervention plans. This article addresses the question whether the use of this tool results in better agreement between probation officers. A significant and meaningful improvement in agreement was found on all domains of the intervention plan. Implications for probation practice are discussed.