In efforts to move away from a carceral response to crime, judges across the country are increasingly sentencing individuals to community supervision or probation. When individuals receive a sentence under probation, they also receive a set of rules to follow during their probation sentence. This could include meeting frequently with a probation officer (PO), enrolling and participating in treatment, securing and maintaining employment or housing, and abiding by curfew hours.

However, many individuals under probation supervision struggle to follow the sheer number of conditions. They typically struggle to comply with probation’s rules because they lack the resources (e.g., transportation to get to appointments, income/insurance to enroll in treatment programs) and/or because they live in neighborhoods presenting challenges to compliance (e.g., no public transportation, limited/no access to treatment options). Therefore, non-compliance to the rules may not be exclusively related to individual choices, and instead may be as related to lack of steady income, limited or no transportation and housing, and limited or no access to health insurance. Unfortunately, when non-compliance does occur for individuals under supervision, they can return back to jail or prison — probation revocation.

Reducing the number of times individuals cycle through the criminal legal system means we must critically understand why individuals return to jail or prison for probation revocations. Preventing this cycle requires that we center individuals by understanding the challenges they experience both at the individual and community level. It requires rethinking the necessitty of punishment to achieve behavior change with individuals under probation supervision.

This project explores how two judicial districts in Iowa reduced their reliance on punishment via non-compliance violations by reducing the number of probation conditions and rewriting those conditions to offer more flexibility that aligns with the principles of behavior change.