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.

JSP is working Monroe County, Indiana, to critically examine the challenges individuals face when navigating the rules of probation with the goal of helping people finish probation and not return to jail. To that end, JSP is facilitating a series of meetings with key stakeholders to help review, categorize, revise, and individualize conditions of supervision. This work includes reimagining community corrections by removing some rules altogether and rewriting others to allow staff to treat people as unique and complex individuals.