No abstract

Probation is a common sanction for youth substance users, and as such, juvenile probation officers (JPOs) shoulder much of the burden for treatment and rehabilitation. To improve youth outcomes and alleviate some of the burden, JPOs may seek parental involvement in the probation and substance use desistance processes. Using focus group data, we analyzed JPO perceptions of the role parents play in contingency management (CM)—an incentive system designed to produce and reward decreased substance use—and whether they perceived any value in CM. We found that most JPOs perceived parental involvement as critical to the success of both substance use treatment and CM for youth. Our findings also suggest JPOs found parental involvement in CM valuable given that CM was employed on nonstudy clients and future clients. This has implications for the practicality and sustainability of CM as a youth probation intervention.

No abstract

Probation officers (POs) are perhaps the correctional workers with the greatest reach, since more people are under probation supervision relative to every other correctional branch (i.e., jail, prison, and parole). The individuals under probation supervision and the community-at-large depend on POs to do their job well. However, POs have a job that requires them to make numerous decisions within an organization with conflicting goals and ambiguous roles, often with great discretionary power and little oversight. This relatively autonomous discretionary power often produces racial disparities in probation outcomes, the misuse of evidence-based tools such as risk and needs assessments, and ultimately the inability of probation organizations to effectuate change. These effects have negative consequences for probation organizations, probationers, and POs themselves. Participatory management produces an organizing framework that calls for hierarchical organizations to take a balanced approach to decision-making by increasing information sharing throughout the organizational hierarchy. This organizational structure carries the potential to remedy these aforementioned problems. By increasing oversight and accountability for POs via participatory management, POs’ discretionary power may be managed without limiting decision-making. Participatory management may create additional benefits such as increasing the efficiency of probation organizations, improving client outcomes for probationers, and increasing occupational satisfaction for POs. There are numerous potential threats to participatory management and several solutions for overcoming them. The main solution calls on probation agencies to make participatory management as effective as possible by constructing an equal balance between a loosely and tightly coupled organizational implementation of policies and practices.