Agreement About Intervention Plans By Probation Officers

Abstract

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.

Improving Agreement About Intervention Plans in Probation by Decision Support

“…The new probation officers were more experienced than the officers who had dropped out. In the RISc2-study, we had already concluded that experience does not have a substantial effect on the agreement between probation officers about intervention plans (Bosker et al, 2013a), and indeed additional analyses in the RISc3-study showed that the higher number of experienced probation officers did not influence the results substantially. Because working with the same group of professionals in two studies proved to be difficult, working with two random samples might have been easier and probably would have led to similar results.…”

“…In that study, a group of Dutch probation officers was asked to write intervention plans for four cases in which the risk and needs assessment was given. Although results differed per domain of the intervention plan, overall agreement was poor (Bosker et al, 2013a).…”

“…In the initial version of RISc, intervention plans were based on a structured risk and needs assessment, but decision making about these plans was not supported. In a previous study, Bosker, Witteman, and Hermanns (2013a) described the agreement of Dutch probation officers about the intervention plans. In that study, a group of Dutch probation officers was asked to write intervention plans for four cases in which the risk and needs assessment was given.…”

“…For the intervention domain, we added a category "supervision" as a general intervention for support and practical aid. For details about the clustering, see Bosker et al (2013a).…”

“…Because the same procedure was followed in the RISc2-study and the RISc3-study, the limitations that were described for the RISc2-study apply to this study too (Bosker et al, 2013a). The probation officers had to work with a paper case for which the basic assessment was given.…”