Essay On Probation

For my field report, I chose to study the legal issues with probation in the U.S. criminal justice system and possible factors that can lead a probationer to recidivate. My focus of probation, recidivism, and law stems from my hands on experience doing research that addressed all three elements. I assisted in data gathering, entry, and analysis for the purpose of validating a risk assessment “STRONG” utilized by my local county probation department to address probationers’ cognitive behaviors and risk factors before their sentence is completed and released into the community. Before going further into my personal interaction with the “real world of law,” I will first give a brief history of probation in the United States, and the current issues in California to give better background on the purpose and need for research projects such as the one I am assisting with San Diego State University-Imperial Valley Campus.

In the 1840s, John Augustus approached various Boston courts to get minor offenders released into his custody (Pearson, Allen, Latessa, Ponder, & Simonsen, 2010). As time passed, informal examples of supervised probation grew into a more formalized practice in the Western Hemisphere judicial systems. As previously mentioned in class lecture, probation became an option used by both adversarial and inquisitional court systems as a less harsh punishment (Kaplan, 2014). As societies diversified and grew in complexity, so did the agencies of social control and its people. During the Industrial Revolution, Durkheim noted a trend of organic solidarity, where legal institutions regulated behaviors of individuals on the principles of exchange and restitution rather than deterrence punishment. Those principles of retributi...

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Feinman, J. M. (2006). Ch. 9 Protecting the Innocent, Freeing the Guilty. Law 101 everything you need to know about the American legal system (2nd ed., pp. 335-337). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kaplan, P. (Director) (2014, July 9). Feinman 1. CJ 301 Law and Society. Lecture conducted from San Diego State University, San Diego.

Maruschak, L. M., Bonczar, T. P., & Bureau of Justice. (2013). Probation and Parole in the United States, 2012 (NCJ 243826). Retrieved from Department of Justice website: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ppus12.pdf

Pearson, Allen, Latessa, Ponder, & Simonsen. (2010). Probation. Retrieved July 23, 2014, from http://wps.prenhall.com/chet_allen_corrections_11/43/11009/2818542.cw/index.html

Stohr, M. K., & Walsh, A. (2012). Ch. 6 Probation and Community Corrections. Corrections: the essentials (pp. 105-106). Los Angeles: SAGE.