Probationer Risk Assessment

Risk Assessment

The first contact between an officer and a probationer is when an officer estimates a probationer’s risk. This is deterring if re-offending of a crime in the presentence investigation report. The report informs the type of supervision the probationers, receives. Certain disorders in its self are a fragile predictor of recidivism compared to factors such as substance abuse such as mental disorder (Trotter). One example is substance abuse it is one of the eight risk factors for general recidivism, and was found to have a mean effect on general recidivism compared to a negative effect on mental disorders. Officers mistakenly believe that many disorders are a forceful risk factor and rate probationers with mental disorder as high-risk. Even agencies uses a structured risk measurement to assessment probationers’ risk, officers may look away from ratings risk that disagree with their perceptions to rate the probationer’s.

Risk Management

The officer takes public’s view that may be especially true if they shares the persons with mental disorder are extremely violent. If the probationer’s receives a low risk score based on general risk factors, an officer who believes that such disorder as mental or physical strongly predicts violence may override that score and assign a high risk rating to that probationers. First, the probation officer may recommend that the probationers be assigned to a higher observation caseload. As noted above, high levels of supervision lead to a higher possibility of infractions being discovered. This may set up the probationers to fail from the beginning of supervision. Number two; another officer may make references regarding specific condition of probation. Officers who view mental health tr...

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...der can engage or pursue treatment that will reduce the risk to public incident.

These issues related to overloading casework are complicated by additional trends in community-based corrections. Probation was once a place for relatively low-level offenders that posed little threat to public safety and were mostly in need of pro-social steering (Petersilia,1998) (DeMichele, 2007). Probation and Parole reviewed each and every case files in simplest for compliance with many division policies and procedures. Probation and Parole compares the number of contacts in and at different field officers made to the number of contacts required to be made to ensure the offender are assigned to the correct level of supervision based on the division's availability, and determined if violation and case summary reports are completed in a timely and accurately (McCaskill, 2006).