NSF Award
2214342
Nearly 3.9 million adults are under probation and parole (i.e., community supervision) in the United States, more than double the incarcerated population. About one-third of the prison population are persons on community supervision at the time of the event leading to their reincarceration. Probation and parole officers (PPOs) are the frontline workers in community supervision and are important agents of change for client outcomes. This project studies PPO-related factors, specifically PPO stress and PPO-client relationship that can inform interventions targeted at PPOs to better prepare them to improve community supervision outcomes. A high-quality PPO-client relationship is considered one of the Core Correction Practices, highlighting the prominent position of the PPO-client relationship in practice and its importance as the delivery mechanism for interventions. PPOs assume dual roles of law enforcer and social worker to ensure public safety and clients’ successful reentry. With such complex job roles come with various stressors including physical threats and emotion exhaustion. To be an effective delivery mechanism for interventions, the PPO-client relationship requires deliberate cultivation by PPOs, and PPO stress can impede these efforts. This project will contribute to the knowledge of how to reduce recidivism and facilitate the reintegration of the millions of former offenders, outcomes that, in turn, would reduce societal costs linked to reincarceration and failure of reintegration. As criminal justice interventions aiming to reintegrate former offenders all involve personal relationships between an agent who delivers the intervention and a client, this project contributes to the larger and broader issue of how the agent's stress affects the agent-client relationship and, consequently, the intervention's success. The project will increase partnership between academia and agency to inform practice and promote the development of students from underrepresented groups to engage in interdisciplinary research of high policy relevance. <br/><br/>The researchers adopt a biosocial perspective to investigate the impact of PPO stress and PPO-client relationship on clients’ outcomes. They will use a concurrent multi-method panel design and gather data from 150 PPOs and their 750 high-risk clients in the Georgia Department of Community Supervision (DCS) every 6 months for 4 waves. The researchers will collect saliva samples (for stress biomarkers) and survey data (for self-report stressor sources and PPO-client relationships) from PPOs; construct the clients' reintegration and recidivism outcomes from agency records. Objective measure of PPO-client relationship will be derived by observer ratings from video recordings of PPO-client interactions, part of DCS's routine data collection. The researchers will also explore the utility of using novel technology that implements a widely used facial coding system to process clients' facial expressions of emotions during interactions as a proxy for relationship quality. Multilevel structural equation modeling with lagged outcomes will be used to address the research questions. Findings will fill in a significant knowledge gap regarding the effect of PPO stress on clients’ recidivism and reintegration outcomes and generate knowledge regarding effective delivery mechanisms for criminal justice intervention.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
