Title: Police-Corrections Partnerships. Series: Issues and Practices Author: Dale Parent and Brad Snyder Published: National Institute of Justice, March 1999 Subject: Probation and parole, community policing, police patrol, crime patterns and future trends 88 pages 194,000 bytes ------------------------------- Figures, charts, forms, and tables are not included in this ASCII plain-text file. To view this document in its entirety, download the Adobe Acrobat graphic file available from this Web site or order a print copy from NCJRS at 800-851-3420 (877-712-9279 For TTY users). ------------------------------- U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs National Institute of Justice Issues and Practices Police-Corrections Partnerships ------------------------------- U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs 810 Seventh Street N.W. Washington, DC 20531 Janet Reno Attorney General Raymond C. Fisher Associate Attorney General Laurie Robinson Assistant Attorney General No'l Brennan Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jeremy Travis Director, National Institute of Justice Office of Justice Programs World Wide Web Site http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov National Institute of Justice World Wide Web Site http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij ------------------------------- Police-Corrections Partnerships by Dale Parent and Brad Snyder March 1999 NCJ 175047 Issues and Practices in Criminal Justice is a publication series of the National Institute of Justice. Each report presents the program options and management issues in a topic area, based on a review of research and evaluation findings, operational experience, and expert opinion on the subject. The intent is to provide information to make informed choices in planning, implementing, and improving programs and practices in criminal justice. ------------------------------- National Institute of Justice Jeremy Travis Director Vincent Talucci Program Monitor Office of Community Oriented Policing Services Joe Brann Director Corrections Program Office Larry Meachum Director Project Advisers Marisela Montes Former Deputy Director Parole and Community Services Division California Department of Corrections 1515 S Street Box 942883 Sacramento, CA 94283-0001 James Jordan Director of Strategic Planning Boston Police Department 154 Berkeley Street Room 605 Boston, MA 02116 Richard Stalder President, American Correctional Association Secretary of Correctional Services Department of Public Safety and Corrections P.O. Box 94304, Capitol Station Baton Rouge, LA 70804-9304 Prepared for the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, by Abt Associates Inc., under contract #OJP-94-C-007. Points of view or opinions stated in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. ------------------------------- The National Institute of Justice is a component of the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and the Office for Victims of Crime. ------------------------------- Table of Contents Foreword Acknowledgments Executive Summary Types of Partnerships Potential Benefits and Problems Challenges in Developing Police-Corrections Partnerships The Future of Police-Corrections Partnerships Organization of the Report Chapter 1: The Development of Police-Corrections Partnerships Potential Benefits of Police-Corrections Partnerships Potential Problems With Police-Corrections Partnerships Notes Chapter 2: Enhanced Supervision Programs Operation Night Light, Boston, Massachusetts Minneapolis Anti-Violence Initiative (MAVI), Minneapolis, Minnesota History and Goal Operations Results Clark County Anti-Gang Unit, Vancouver, Washington History and Goals Operations Results Project One Voice, New Haven, Connecticut History and Goals Operations Results Smart Partners Program, Bellevue and Redmond, Washington History and Goals Operations Results Neighborhood Probation, Maricopa County, Phoenix, Arizona History and Goals Operations Results Notes Chapter 3: Other Police-Corrections Partnerships Fugitive Apprehension Units Parolee-At-Large Apprehension Teams, California Department of Corrections History and Goals Operations Results Fugitive Recovery Enforcement Team, San Francisco, California History and Goals Operations Results Fugitive Apprehension Program, Hennepin County (Minnesota) Department of Community Corrections History and Goals Operations Results Information-Sharing Partnerships Sex Offender Registration and Notification, Washington State Department of Corrections History and Goals Operations Results Serious Habitual Offender Program, California Department of Justice History and Goals Operations Prison Anti-Gang Partnerships Washington State Prison Anti-Gang Program Connecticut Department of Corrections Anti-Gang Program Specialized Enforcement Partnership: Operation Revitalization, Vallejo, California Interagency Problem-Solving Partnership: The Parole and Community Services Law Enforcement Consortium, California History and Goals Operations Conclusion Notes Chapter 4: Challenges to Partnering Planning Partnerships Building and Maintaining Support Dealing With Limited Resources Overcoming Mistrust, Misinformation, and Stereotypes Removing Barriers to Information Sharing Chapter 5: The Future of Police-Corrections Partnerships Legal Issues Research Issues What Are the PartnershipÕs Goals? How Will the Goals Be Achieved? What Conditions Must Be Met To Achieve the Intended Goals? Did the Partnership Achieve Its Goals? Was the Partnership Implemented as Intended? Did Factors Besides the Partnership Affect the Outcomes? What Effects Did the Partnership Have on the Criminal Justice System? Did the Partnership Make Midcourse Corrections? What Kinds of Partnerships Work Best? Guiding the Future Development of Police-Corrections Partnerships Notes Selected Bibliography Appendix: Contact List Tables and Figures Table 1 Police-Corrections Partnerships Described in This Study Table 2 Characteristics of Enhanced Supervision and Neighborhood Probation Projects Table 3 Characteristics of Fugitive Units Figure 1 Gang Unit Street Contact Card, Clark County (Washington) SheriffÕs Department Figure 2 Palm Card--Project One Voice, New Haven, Connecticut ------------------------------- Foreword In the past 4 years, a substantial number of law enforcement and correctional agencies have instituted partnerships in which staff from both agencies jointly perform functions that provide benefits to both agencies. Many of these police-corrections partnerships have been started in jurisdictions that first implemented community policing programs, which try to reduce crime by solving community problems that contribute to crime. Solving these problems often requires access to services or resources that are controlled by other agencies or organizations in the community. Hence, community policing emphasizes the formation of partnerships among police, the community, and other agencies to address selected problems. Advocates believe that police-corrections partnerships have the potential to reshape the way both policing and correctional services are performed. For example, if police-corrections partnerships are successful in preventing crimes, the demand for high-security confinement may be lessened, and resources could be freed for other important social purposes. However, the promise of police-corrections partnerships has yet to be fully demonstrated. At present, they are used in a variety of ways to achieve a range of purposes, but no studies of their effectiveness have been completed. Some police-corrections partnerships were designed to work within a new framework--such as community policing--and hence involve both law enforcement and corrections staff in the pursuit of new goals. Others have arisen solely as a pragmatic solution to an existing problem. These partnerships tend to emphasize doing old tasks better or more efficiently. This report describes police-corrections partnerships from various jurisdictions around the country. It analyzes the barriers the jurisdictions had to overcome to start their partnerships and the problems they had to solve to make them work as intended. Finally, it examines important issues that jurisdictions should consider when starting new police- corrections partnerships. Police-corrections partnerships are at a critical point in their development, and the policy choices that jurisdictions make when implementing new partnerships will define the field in the future. This report can promote critical reflection in making these choices. Joe Brann, Director Office of Community Oriented Policing Services Jeremy Travis, Director National Institute of Justice Larry Meachum, Director Corrections Program Office ------------------------------- Acknowledgments Abt Associates Inc. is indebted to many people whose contributions improved this project and eased our work. We profited from initial consultations with Joe Brann, Director of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, Larry Meachum, Director of the Corrections Programs Office, and Jeremy Travis, Director of the National Institute of Justice. The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) convened an advisory board consisting of: Ron Corbett Deputy Director Office of Commissioner of Probation Commonwealth of Massachusetts Jim Jordan Director of Strategic Planning Boston, Massachusetts, Police Department Marisela Montes Deputy Director Parole and Community Services Division California Department of Corrections Richard Stalder President, American Correctional Association Secretary of Corrections Services Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections Advisers met in December 1997 to discuss issues that needed to be addressed in the study and to help identify sites we should cover in our telephone survey. Officials from several Federal agencies met with staff and advisers and provided additional valuable input. They included: Ed Barajas Corrections Program Specialist National Institute of Corrections Phillip Merkle Corrections Program Office Office of Justice Programs Tom Quinn Former Fellow National Institute of Justice Office of Justice Programs John Thomas National Institute of Justice Office of Justice Programs Dave Walchak Senior Policy Advisor to the Director Office of Community Oriented Policing Services Special thanks are due to State and local officials who organized and hosted visits to programs in their jurisdictions, including: James Robertson Supervisor of Adult Field Services Hennepin County Department of Community Corrections Minneapolis, Minnesota Norm Helber Director Maricopa County Probation Department Phoenix, Arizona Rick Rimmer Parole and Community Services Division California Department of Corrections Sergeant Chuck Atkins Clark County Sheriffs Office Vancouver, Washington Steve Marrs Regional Community Corrections Director Washington Department of Corrections Bellevue, Washington Commander Terry Morgan Redmond Police Department Redmond, Washington We also acknowledge Vincent Talucci, our NIJ project monitor, who provided guidance, oversight, and sage advice and who accompanied project staff on visits to several of the sites. ------------------------------- Executive Summary In recent years, dozens of police and corrections agencies have formed partnerships in which their staff collaborate in ways that benefit both agencies. Some partnerships are pragmatic efforts to solve specific problems--for example, to reduce youth firearms violence or to lower the number of fugitives at large in a community. Other partnerships operate in the context of broader reforms--such as community policing or neighborhood-based probation--that are intended to change fundamentally the way policing or corrections services are delivered. This report describes 14 police-corrections partnerships. Ten additional partnerships will be featured in a forthcoming National Institute of Corrections (NIC) publication and are not covered in detail in this report. (For further information contact NIC at 1-800-995-6429.) Interest in police-corrections partnerships appears to be growing rapidly. Indeed, partnerships are in early stages of planning or development in several additional jurisdictions. TYPES OF PARTNERSHIPS The police-corrections partnerships identified in this study fall into five categories. Enhanced supervision partnerships. Police and correction officers perform joint supervision of selected offenders who are on probation or parole. Police and corrections officers also collaborate in support functions, such as information sharing and training. Offenders usually are selected for joint supervision because they are deemed high risk or are believed to be criminally active. Most enhanced supervision partnerships try to reduce crime by deterring offenders from committing new crimes or technical violations and by improving offenders' access to needed services. Other partnerships also stress general crime prevention by improving the quality of life in targeted neighborhoods. Several of these partnerships are described in chapter 2 of this report. Fugitive apprehension units. Police and corrections officers collaborate to locate and apprehend persons who have absconded from probation or parole supervision. Often these persons also have outstanding arrest warrants for other reasons. These partnerships also involve information sharing, training, tactical communication, and joint operations. Information-sharing partnerships. Police and corrections staff develop procedures to exchange information about offenders who are of particular interest to each of them. For example, police gang units may supply State prison officials with information about the gang affiliations and activities of offenders from their jurisdiction who are sent to prison. In exchange, prison officials may alert local police when gang-involved offenders are about to be released from prison, and describe their gang activities while confined. Specialized enforcement partnerships. Police and corrections officials (and often representatives of other community organizations and programs) collaborate to reduce specific problems in communities by, for example, suppressing criminally active gangs or lowering overall levels of firearms violence by youths. These partnerships typically involve information sharing among participating agencies, a means of obtaining broad-based input from the communities served, and joint performance by police and corrections of particular enforcement or supervision functions, such as neighborhood patrols or home visits. Finally, these partnerships usually involve collaboration between police and corrections agencies in key support functions, such as training and information systems. Interagency problem-solving partnerships. Leaders of police and corrections agencies regularly confer to identify problems of mutual concern and allocate resources to identify and implement solutions. These last four types of partnerships are described more fully in chapter 3 of this report. POTENTIAL BENEFITS AND PROBLEMS Advocates point to several important benefits that police-corrections partnerships may offer: --Partnerships may help both police and corrections do a better job of protecting the public by using the powers of their respective line staff in complementary ways. For example, if police officers know who is on probation and what conditions they are supposed to obey, they may be able to deter violations by increasing the odds that violations will be detected, particularly violations related to curfews and associating with other offenders. --Staff morale may be improved in both agencies by breaking down old patterns of mistrust, correcting misinformation, and encouraging staff flexibility and creativity in solving community problems. --Police and corrections agencies may be able to achieve common goals-- such as crime reduction--more effectively through collaboration and information sharing. --By extending partnerships to include other social services and community organizations, delivery of services to target neighborhoods may be improved. --Partnering agencies may be able to generate or improve support for their collaborative efforts from both policymakers and the general public. Critics raise important concerns about the partnerships: --Police-corrections partnerships may blur traditional distinctions in the powers or roles of staff in the partnering agencies. --Some practices in joint police-corrections operations may alter the foundation set forth in case law, which supports a broad power of warrantless searches by probation and parole officers. --Police-corrections partnerships have not been carefully evaluated to determine how effective they are in achieving their goals or what effects they have on system costs. CHALLENGES IN DEVELOPING POLICE-CORRECTIONS PARTNERSHIPS Jurisdictions that start and maintain police-corrections partnerships must overcome a number of challenges. Planning partnerships. Partners need to: (a) define their goals, (b) specify the means by which those goals are to be achieved, (c) identify and secure the resources needed to implement those means, (d) define procedures needed for effective implementation, and (e) define tasks and assign responsibilities for accomplishing them. Partnering agencies need to be creative and adaptable. Agencies can foster creativity by giving line staff more decisionmaking authority and encouraging staff to take risks. Agencies can promote adaptability by viewing partnerships not as a finished product but as a work requiring constant review and fine tuning. Building and maintaining support. Building support is a critical process that begins before the partnership is actually formed and continues as long as it operates. Partnerships need support from all stakeholders. In several partnerships stakeholders served on a committee that first planned the innovation and later reviewed and refined its operation. Benefits are the "glue" that hold partnerships together. Planners need to identify and expand mutual benefits that flow from collaboration and ensure that the benefits are clearly communicated to staff in all participating organizations. Support must be maintained throughout the life of the partnership because environments and organizations undergo constant change. Dealing with limited resources. Partners need to identify the resources required to make their collaboration work and develop a strategy to secure them. One strategy is to reallocate current resources among the partnering agencies. In some instances, collaborating agencies have leveraged the partnership to secure new funding. For example, instead of a department of corrections alone seeking funding for more parole officers to implement a fugitive apprehension unit, the request might be supported by partnering police who are eager to get more high-risk absconders off the streets. Overcoming mistrust, misinformation, and stereotypes. The partnering agencies may need to overcome a history of antagonism or even hostility. Several partnerships devoted early meetings to open discussions among representatives of partnering agencies designed to identify sources of hostility and to correct misperceptions and misinformation. Removing barriers to information sharing. Almost all agencies involved in police-corrections partnerships previously experienced substantial barriers to exchanging information both between agencies and among staff within different agencies. Officials were understandably reluctant to share intelligence information with persons outside their agency. Existing laws and regulations relating to confidentiality had to be examined. Hostility and suspicion between staff in the two agencies had to be overcome. Solving operational problems. Each police-corrections partnership differs, because they exist in different jurisdictions and settings, and because they are formed to address different issues. As a result, for partnerships to succeed, officials must develop the capacity to solve unique problems that arise as the program is implemented and that threaten their ability to achieve their goals. This places an emphasis on monitoring and feedback (to recognize problems quickly) and on creativity and flexibility (to design and implement solutions). THE FUTURE OF POLICE-CORRECTIONS PARTNERSHIPS Interest in police-corrections partnerships appears to be on the upswing. However, important issues have not been adequately addressed in initial partnerships. These issues may affect the configuration and effectiveness of partnerships in the future. Legal issues. In most jurisdictions probation or parole officers (unlike police) have broad power to conduct warrantless searches of persons under their supervision. Evidence bearing on violations of conditions of supervision that is discovered in such searches can be used in revocation hearings, even though it would be excluded from use in trials for new criminal conduct. Case law supporting warrantless searches has been based, in part, on the premise that corrections searches are neutral and supervisory, aimed at deciding whether conditional release should continue, whereas police searches are adversarial, aimed at uncovering evidence to convict in criminal trials. If police and corrections partners share a common goal of imprisoning targeted offenders, and if they use warrantless searches as one tool to achieve this goal, courts might no longer view the role of corrections as neutral and supervisory. Research issues. Outcome evaluations of police-corrections partnerships are lacking. To improve the effectiveness of partnerships, it is important that an evaluation capacity be built into future police-corrections partnerships to address the following questions: --What are the partnership's goals? --How did the partners expect to achieve these goals? --What conditions must be met to achieve these goals? --Was the partnership implemented as intended? --Did the partners make midcourse corrections to stay focused on their goals? --Did the partnership achieve its goals? --Did factors other than the partnership itself affect the outcomes? --Did the partnership have any effects on the criminal justice system and the community? If so, what effects? Once a number of evaluation studies have been completed, researchers should compare findings to determine what kinds of partnerships work best. Guiding the future of police-corrections partnerships. As more partnerships develop, their potential for serving the criminal justice system and the communities in which they operate also increases. As a result, it is important that policymakers define what their particular partnership should look like, what goals it should seek, how it ought to operate, and how they believe it should affect both the community it serves and the criminal justice system. ORGANIZATION OF THE REPORT Chapter 1 describes potential benefits and problems associated with police-corrections partnerships and reports how the study was conducted. Chapter 2 focuses on the most common type of partnership--enhanced supervision programs--which accounts for 5 of the 14 police-corrections partnerships covered in this study. Chapter 3 describes four other types of partnerships: (1) fugitive apprehension units, (2) information sharing partnerships, (3) specialized enforcement units, and (4) interagency problem-solving partnerships. Chapter 4 highlights problems police-corrections partnerships have encountered and solutions that have been attempted. Chapter 5 identifies issues in the future development of police-corrections partnerships and research questions that remain to be addressed. The report contains an appendix and a bibliography. The appendix provides a list of contact persons at the partnerships covered in this report and a compilation of materials on partnerships, community policing, community justice, and restorative justice available from local, State, and Federal criminal justice agencies; educational institutions; professional associations; or the partnerships themselves. ------------------------------- C H A P T E R 1: THE DEVELOPMENT OF POLICE-CORRECTIONS PARTNERSHIPS In recent years, police and correctional agencies in many jurisdictions have formed a variety of partnerships in which their staff collaborate to share information or jointly perform services in ways that benefit both agencies. Some of these partnerships are formalized--they are the product of a detailed planning process, have multiagency advisory or oversight boards, and operate pursuant to written procedures. Other partnerships are informal, having evolved because a handful of staff in the two or more agencies involved began talking about better ways to do their jobs. Some partnerships are mainly known only to those directly involved. Others have been widely publicized and have served as prototypes for new programs. The police-corrections partnerships examined for this study arose in one of two ways. First, some partnerships developed to solve specific problems, and their development was driven by a need to produce practical results. For example, there might be a public outcry over a large number of parole absconders at large in the community, which can prompt a parole agency to begin a partnership to locate and apprehend absconders. Second, some partnerships developed in the context of other reforms that were intended to alter in fundamental ways the manner in which policing and corrections are performed. In law enforcement, the most common such reform is community policing. In corrections, emerging reform models are termed "community justice" or "community probation." The concept of community policing has been embraced by a large number of policing agencies. The concepts of community justice and community probation have emerged only recently and are just beginning to influence practices of corrections agencies. It is helpful to describe community policing briefly in order to set a context for the development of police-corrections partnerships. Community policing (also termed problem-oriented policing) was proposed in the late 1970s as an alternative to the "professional" model of policing, which had dominated the field for the previous 25 years. Under the professional policing model, police were to protect the public by deterring and incapacitating criminals. They tried to deter criminals with tactics designed to increase the odds that criminals would be caught. Police varied patrol patterns to improve their chances of observing crimes in progress, or to make offenders less certain about when a patrol car might appear. Police tried to incapacitate criminals by capturing them and solving crimes. Police tried to minimize response times to reported crime to increase the chances of apprehending a perpetrator at or near the crime scene. This meant patrol officers had to be highly mobile and be linked by sophisticated communications systems. Police often viewed calls for service or assistance from the residents of a community as impediments to their "real" work, and service calls were dealt with quickly so officers could get back to patrol. The professional model of policing isolated police officers from the community by keeping them quite literally "confined" to their squad cars. Policing was something law enforcement officers did for a community rather than with a community. In 1979 Herman Goldstein proposed a "problem-oriented" approach to policing.[1] This approach viewed public safety as the product of primary institutions of social control, like families, schools, churches, and civic organizations. When these institutions are thriving within a community, crime will be suppressed. Conversely, if these institutions are thwarted, crime will flourish, and efforts by police to suppress crime will be largely ineffective. Community policing, therefore, is a fundamental shift from traditional reactive responses to crime. In community policing, officials try to reduce the fear of crime and social disorder by forming partnerships with community organizations and agencies to solve community problems. Community policing tries to combat crime primarily by preventing it and by improving the quality of life in the community. Community policing requires that policing agencies modify their command and control structure to better support and empower front-line officers, and to encourage them to pursue innovative approaches to problem solving. Community policing is distinguished by several factors. First, policing services are organized on a geographic basis, usually around neighborhoods. Second, police officers try to maximize their contacts with residents in the neighborhoods. Often, this is done by putting officers on foot or bicycle patrols. Third, community organizations and groups meet with police regularly to identify problems that need to be solved, to establish strategies for solving them, and to get feedback on the progress of initiatives. Fourth, police form partnerships with a variety of agencies and organizations that control resources needed to solve problems. In recent years the notion of partnerships has grown throughout criminal justice, including community corrections. As with law enforcement, corrections is beginning to redefine its role in terms of its impact on community safety. As such, many of the same concepts of community involvement, problem solving, and partnerships are emerging as important themes for probation and parole agencies. This report is designed to help police and corrections administrators and policymakers learn more about the benefits and problems associated with police-corrections partnerships, so they can make informed decisions about whether to implement such partnerships in their jurisdictions. The report describes several broad categories of partnerships and uses mini-case studies to illustrate how they started, what they are attempting to accomplish, how they operate, and what they have achieved. (See "How the Study Was Done.") The report also describes problems officials have had to resolve in order to establish their partnerships and suggests important future research and policy issues related to those partnerships. This study describes the 14 police-corrections partnerships shown in table 1. These are divided into five categories: --Enhanced supervision partnerships, in which police and probation or parole officers perform joint supervision or other joint functions related to offenders in the community. The object of enhanced supervision partnerships is to reduce crimes committed by persons on probation or parole by increasing the odds that violation of their conditions of supervision will be detected and by intervening more quickly and effectively if offenders' adjustment while under supervision begins to decline. Some of these partnerships also stress crime prevention and the improved delivery of social services in targeted neighborhoods. --Fugitive apprehension units, in which police and correctional agencies collaborate to locate and apprehend persons who have absconded from probation or parole supervision. --Information-sharing partnerships, in which corrections and law enforcement agencies institute procedures to exchange information related to offenders. The programs described in this report involve notification (to police agencies and/or communities) when sex offenders are released from prison and the gathering of gang intelligence information for use in prisons. --Specialized enforcement partnerships, in which police and correctional agencies, as well as community organizations, collaborate to rid communities of particular problems. --Interagency problem-solving partnerships, in which law enforcement and correctional agencies confer to identify problems of mutual concern and to identify and implement solutions to them. In addition, 10 other programs were identified that involved partnerships between local police and correctional agencies in which the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) had played an important role--for example, by providing technical assistance or training. These 10 programs will be featured in a separate monograph being prepared by NIC and are not covered in any detail in this report. The partnerships linked to NIC (mostly enhanced supervision or specialized enforcement partnerships) are located in the following jurisdictions: --Austin, Texas. --Baltimore, Maryland. --Boston, Massachusetts. --Denver, Colorado. --Deschutes County, Oregon. --Indianapolis, Indiana. --Multnomah County, Oregon. --Sarasota, Florida. --Spokane, Washington. --Tampa, Florida. The Deschutes County (Oregon) project is an effort to reform local corrections under a community justice model in which the primary role of local corrections is to solve problems that diminish citizens' quality of life in the community. A number of other jurisdictions were identified in which police-corrections partnerships were in early stages of planning or development. These are not included in this report because they were still in an embryonic stage. POTENTIAL BENEFITS OF POLICE-CORRECTIONS PARTNERSHIPS Advocates point to important benefits that police-corrections partnerships may offer: --They may help both police and corrections do a better job of protecting the public by allowing them to use the powers of their line staff in complementary ways. For example, under a partnership, a probation agency might give police officers written information about who is on probation and what conditions they are required to obey. If a police officer sees a probationer who is supposed to obey a 9 p.m. curfew on the street at 11 p.m., the police officer can document the violation and pass that information along to the offender's probation officer. A police officer might not have legal authority to prevent a gang member who is on probation from associating with other gang members. However, if a probation officer and a police officer are conducting a joint patrol and observe a probationer in a group of known gang members, the probation officer could arrest the probationer and commence revocation proceedings if his or her conditions of release prohibited associating with other known gang members. --Improved information sharing may help police officers investigate and solve crimes and may help probation and parole officers by giving them more information about persons with whom probationers or parolees associate. Probation officers may convince a reluctant probationer to cooperate with police in an investigation. Police may give parole officers information about associates of a parolee (for example, that an associate is known to be selling guns) that could enable the parole officers to make better decisions affecting their own safety. --Partnerships may improve staff morale among participating agencies by breaking down old patterns of mistrust, correcting misinformation, and encouraging staff flexibility and creativity in problem solving in the community and in their agencies. --Partnerships may improve the ability of police and correctional agencies to accomplish their common goals. Although evaluations are lacking, some communities have reported substantial reductions in serious crimes after partnerships went into operation.[2] --Partnerships may coordinate the activities of different public and private agencies, removing barriers to and improving the delivery of social services to targeted neighborhoods. --Partnerships may generate positive publicity for all agencies involved. In California, several news stories have given favorable attention to the Department of Corrections' program to apprehend parole absconders. --Partnerships may have political benefits. Agencies may be able to call on their partners to support new legislation or appropriations of interest to them or to persuade a former adversary (now a partner) to take a neutral position on a piece of legislation they consider important. POTENTIAL PROBLEMS WITH POLICE-CORRECTIONS PARTNERSHIPS Some observers have raised questions about potential problems with police-corrections partnerships: --There is a danger that correctional agencies may lose sight of and ultimately relinquish functions that contribute to the shared mission but that they alone can perform. For example, if a successful police-corrections partnership emphasizes the public's protection by maximizing crime deterrence and incapacitation, the partnership might promote an atmosphere within the corrections agency that devalues treatment (a function that might in itself contribute to the public's protection) and that causes the agency to scale down its delivery of treatment services to offenders. --Police or prosecutors might use the correctional partnership to circumvent legal procedures. In many cases, officials could respond to a probation or parole violation either by revoking supervision and imprisoning the offender or by charging the offender with a new crime. Frequently, officials opt for revocation as a cheaper, quicker, and more certain alternative to a new prosecution. That practice may increase as more police and corrections agencies engage in enhanced supervision partnerships. While using revocations in lieu of new prosecution has clear benefits for criminal justice agencies, it raises potential concerns. For example, offenders may be imprisoned on the basis of facts proven by a preponderance of evidence (the applicable standard at a revocation hearing) rather than on facts proven beyond a reasonable doubt. In addition, the range of punishment available for the prior offense may be too lenient or too harsh given the severity of the violation. --Partnerships can blur the powers or roles of staff in the partnering agencies. For example, police might suspect that a person on probation is fencing stolen property but might lack sufficient grounds to obtain a warrant to search the offender's residence. However, if police and corrections officers are partnering to conduct a curfew check, the probation officer could search the offender's residence and share information uncovered during the search with police. Similarly, when police and probation officers conduct a joint neighborhood patrol and an individual who is not on probation resists being arrested by the police officer, the probation officer might be asked to help subdue and handcuff the person. --The cost implications of police-corrections partnerships usually have not been considered carefully in advance. It is typically a straightforward matter to calculate immediate personnel costs (for example, assigning three parole officers to work in a special unit with local police), but estimating long-range costs of a partnership is more difficult. If the net effect of police-corrections partnerships is to increase substantially the number of offenders imprisoned for technical violations of probation or parole, then partnerships that cost little to plan and implement in the community may carry huge price tags for increased court, prosecutorial, and correctional costs. Liability costs also need to be considered. For example, if probation officers help police subdue and handcuff a citizen during a neighborhood patrol, what is the correctional agency's liability if the citizen is injured? If the probation officer is injured? NOTES 1. Goldstein, Herman. "Improving Policing: A Problem-Oriented Approach." Crime and Delinquency 25 (1979):236-258. 2. For example, in Boston assaults with firearms dropped from 799 in 1995 to 126 in 1997. See Corbett, Ronald P., Fitzgerald, Bernard L., and Jordan, James, "Boston's Operation Night Light: An Emerging Model for Police-Probation Partnerships," in Community Corrections: Probation, Parole, and Intermediate Sanctions, ed. Joan Petersilia, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998: 180-186. ------------------------------- How the Study Was Done In July 1997, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) asked Abt Associates Inc. to conduct a study of police-corrections partnerships. Project staff met with representatives from NIJ, the Corrections Program Office, and the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services to plan the study. The group defined a police-corrections partnership as a formal or informal collaboration between police and correctional agencies that: (1) involves staff from each agency in the joint performance of a line or support function and (2) provides benefits to both agencies. An advisory board met to frame the issues: Marisela Montes, Deputy Director, Division of Parole and Community Services, California Department of Corrections; James Jordan, Director of Strategic Planning, Boston Police Department; and Richard Stalder, Secretary, Louisiana Department of Corrections and Public Safety. The study had four components: --Project staff reviewed existing literature on police-corrections partnerships. --A panel of expert informants identified existing partnerships. --Project staff interviewed officials at each partnership to collect basic descriptive information. --Project staff visited 19 partnerships located in 6 States, 14 of which were selected for description in this report. The sites were selected to cover several different types of partnerships and to represent programs in which police and corrections staff played major roles. ------------------------------- C H A P T E R 2: ENHANCED SUPERVISION PROGRAMS Enhanced supervision programs are the largest category of police-corrections partnerships--5 of the 14 programs described in this study fall into this category. (See chapter 1, table 1.) Enhanced supervision programs involve police and correctional agencies in joint supervision or joint performance of some other function (such as neighborhood patrols or information sharing) for persons on probation or parole. OPERATION NIGHT LIGHT, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS Boston's Operation Night Light is one of the oldest enhanced supervision partnerships.[1] A partnership between the Boston Police Department and district court probation officers, Operation Night Light had its roots in a chance encounter in 1990 between probation officers and members of the police department's gang unit, during which they all noted that they often were dealing with the same offenders.[2] This realization sparked a series of brainstorming sessions in which police and probation officers explored ways they could work together more effectively. (See "Enhanced Supervision Programs Draw From ISP and Neighborhood-Based Probation.") Using intelligence information from the police gang unit, probation officers soon began asking judges to include curfews and area restrictions as conditions of supervision when gang-involved offenders were placed on probation. Probation officers also began doing curfew checks and monitoring activity on the streets to ensure that probationers were complying with these conditions. These precursor relationships became formalized as Operation Night Light in 1992 when probation officers and Boston police officers began joint patrols and curfew checks of probationers who, based on intelligence information, were thought to be criminally active. Night Light staff have since: --Shared intelligence information on gang members and activity with local, State, and Federal agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA); the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF); the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS); and the Massachusetts Violent Fugitive Strike Force. --Met with gangs to announce a zero-tolerance policy for gang-related violence and to promise aggressive enforcement against gangs that engage in acts of violence. --Cooperated with other agencies in efforts to "take down" gang leaders and break up gangs that continued to commit violent crimes. Operation Night Light gives Boston police officers (not just members of the gang unit) information on who is on probation and what conditions they are required to obey. As a result, police officers on patrol in Boston reported that they acted as additional eyes and ears for probation around the clock. Because many gang leaders and members are on probation, technical violations of conditions of supervision can be grounds for removing them from the streets quickly, pending the outcome of legal proceedings related to alleged new crimes. Since Operation Night Light began, police and probation officers have made more than 5,000 contacts with gang-involved probationers in the community. No evaluation has been done to determine the extent to which Night Light may have contributed to Boston's contemporaneous drop in serious crimes. Several other initiatives were under way in Boston to combat youth violence,[3] and crime declined in many other cities throughout the United States during the same time period. Regardless, the number of homicides, homicides with firearms, and assaults with firearms all dropped sharply in Boston during the 1990s. In 1993, there were 93 homicides in Boston, compared to 39 between January 1 and November 30, 1997. Sixty-five of the homicides in 1993 involved firearms, compared to 21 in the first 11 months of 1997. Assaults with firearms dropped from 799 in 1995 to 126 during the first 11 months of 1997. Between early 1995 and late 1997, Boston went 21/2 years without a juvenile homicide involving firearms. In the previous 21/2 years, 26 Boston teens died from gunshots.[4] Officials report that Operation Night Light's efforts--joint patrols, curfew checks, and information sharing--have had a significant impact on gang members who are on probation because they have begun to take conditions of supervision much more seriously (although no data are readily available on changes in probation outcomes). In addition, police and probation officers reportedly have developed new respect for one another and recognize that they can use their formal powers in complementary ways in the pursuit of a common purpose.[5] Table 2 lists the enhanced supervision programs described in this chapter and indicates the major features of each. These programs are described in more detail below. MINNEAPOLIS ANTI-VIOLENCE INITIATIVE (MAVI), MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA The Minneapolis Anti-Violence Initiative (MAVI) is a partnership between the Minneapolis Police Department's Gang Strike Force and the Hennepin County Department of Community Corrections. It targets violent adult and juvenile gang members and provides intensive supervision, joint home visits, and joint neighborhood patrols. It was started in mid-1997. HISTORY AND GOAL In 1994, there were 59 murders in Minneapolis. The number of murders jumped to 97 in 1995 and declined slightly to 83 in 1996. This sharp increase troubled many business leaders. In late 1996, the Minnesota Business Coalition, representing some of Minneapolis' largest corporations, offered a challenge to the city's government: If Minneapolis would combat violent crime aggressively, the corporations would provide funds to help plan and implement the effort; if not, several of the companies threatened to relocate their plants to other States. The city of Minneapolis responded by forming the Minnesota Health, Education, and Law and Safety Committee. One of the committee's first tasks was to seek help from the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a law enforcement consulting organization composed of police executives and located in Washington, D.C. The Minnesota Business Coalition initiated the contact with PERF and covered the cost of bringing an expert consultant from PERF to meet with the committee. Impressed by the accomplishments of Boston's Operation Night Light, PERF recommended that Minneapolis create a similar program. A team of officers from the Minneapolis Police Department and the Hennepin County Department of Community Corrections immediately visited Boston and, upon their return, created the Minneapolis Anti-Violence Initiative (MAVI). MAVI's goal is to reduce serious violent crime in Minneapolis. The program targets adult and juvenile offenders who have a history of violence, firearms offenses, or gang involvement--most of whom are on probation or parole. OPERATIONS Twelve police officers assigned to MAVI came from the police department's Gang Strike Force, a unit of officers with 1 to 5 years of policing experience. Jim Robertson of the Hennepin County Department of Community Correction's Adult Field Services office recruited 14 probation officers with an average of 10 to 15 years of experience to balance the relative youthfulness of the Gang Strike Force members. His task was made more difficult because probation officers assigned to MAVI make evening home visits in addition to their normal 40-hour work week. Probation officers are paid overtime for these evening shifts but still face the added stress of working extra hours. To prevent burnout, Robertson normally assigns each probation officer only one evening shift every 2 weeks. Two nights per week, a MAVI team performs home visits to individuals recommended by other probation officers.[6] Robertson refers to these visits as "soft entries" because the teams request permission to enter the residence. Once inside the home, the team reviews the conditions of probation with the probationer and his or her family. With juvenile probationers, this often involves a question-and-answer session with the parent(s). If necessary, the team may ask to search the probationer's room or person. Finally, the team acts as a referral service, connecting probationers and their families to employment agencies, health centers, and other social services. MAVI teams also participate in saturation patrols of particular areas of the city selected for intensive police presence during high-crime hours. Recently, MAVI became countywide in cooperation with the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office because some gang members tried to evade MAVI's attention simply by moving from Minneapolis to surrounding suburbs where the Minneapolis Police Department lacked jurisdiction. RESULTS No formal evaluation of MAVI has been started, but the program has collected some monitoring data. During its first 7 months of operation, MAVI teams visited the residences of 398 adults and 331 juveniles. In 1997, murders declined 30 percent in Minneapolis, dropping to their 1994 level, and assaults and weapons offenses declined slightly. The initiative's costs are borne by individual agency budgets. Officials estimate that MAVI required about $27,000 in added overtime costs in 1997 and expect overtime costs to be about $40,000 for a full year. Probation officers assigned to MAVI say that conducting home visits with police has had a significant impact on probationers. Some probationers were at first incredulous because they had never seen a probation officer doing a home visit. Some tried to run away because they thought they were going to be arrested. Police officers report that they have been treated with more respect by community residents and by offenders since MAVI began. Police also noted that they appreciate the opportunity to get inside offenders' houses, not just to gain intelligence information but also to see where they live, meet their families, and speak to individuals outside an investigative setting. CLARK COUNTY ANTI-GANG UNIT, VANCOUVER, WASHINGTON The Clark County (Vancouver) Anti-Gang Unit is a partnership among the Clark County Sheriff's Department, the Vancouver Police Department, and the Washington Department of Corrections (DOC) that promotes information sharing on gang issues among the participating agencies and provides joint supervision of high-risk gang members who are on probation or parole. It was started in 1995 and modified in 1997 to implement recommendations made by a countywide anti-gang task force. Those recommendations included adding a gang prevention program and enhancing delivery of support programs for at-risk youths. HISTORY AND GOALS Clark County, Washington, with a population of 350,000, is a rapidly growing urban area located on the Columbia River just north of Portland, Oregon. While some gangs had been active in Clark County in the past, law enforcement officials noticed a large increase in 1989. Local officials surmised that some Portland gang members had moved across the river to avoid intensified anti-gang enforcement in Portland. Because Vancouver lacks distinct ethnic neighborhoods, gang members dispersed across the city rather than concentrating in specific areas. This had two effects. First, it diluted the level of gang-related crime and violence in any one part of the city. Second, it was more difficult to convince community leaders that they had a serious and growing gang problem. After fruitless attempts to spur interest in a communitywide response, the Clark County Sheriff's Department began an anti-gang program in 1992 in an attempt to prevent gangs from becoming entrenched. The next year, the Vancouver Police Department started an anti-gang program, and in 1994, the DOC Regional Community Corrections Office in Vancouver established a gang supervision unit. In 1995, DOC and the Sheriff's Department colocated staff, and in 1996, they began joint supervision activities, including home visits. In 1997, they moved the unit into newly renovated offices and were joined by detectives from the Vancouver Police Department. Administrators in the three partnering agencies gave line staff and supervisors freedom to develop and implement plans that, in some ways, fundamentally redefined their job functions (see below). In addition, during development of the anti-gang unit, both the Clark County Sheriff's Department and the Vancouver Police Department were implementing community policing programs. This helped to ensure that leaders and supervisors in both agencies would be familiar with and support the partnership concept. The partnership's initial goal was to suppress gang- related crimes in Clark County. Officials noted that a high percentage of the most serious and criminally active gang members were under community supervision by DOC. By joining forces, law enforcement and corrections could exercise closer surveillance over these offenders and could detect and respond to violations of conditions of supervision more quickly. Efforts to spur a more comprehensive community response paid off in 1997 when the Clark County Anti-Gang Task Force was created. Chaired by Undersheriff Jane Johnson, the task force brought together key community and criminal justice organizations and created a master plan for dealing with gangs. The master plan set forth three goals: --Suppress gang-related crime. --Prevent youths from becoming gang-involved. --Deliver support programs for at-risk youths. The three agencies adopted the task force's recommendations, added staff to the Anti-Gang Unit to coordinate and develop the prevention and support programs, and moved the unit into newly refurbished offices near the county courthouse. The task force was reconstituted as an ongoing advisory board to the unit. Juvenile courts and the juvenile probation department have not actively participated in the partnership, although the juvenile probation department has sent representatives to meetings of the task force and advisory board. Officials on the advisory board are attempting to bring juvenile justice agencies into the partnership. OPERATIONS The Anti-Gang Unit consists of four detectives, two from the Clark County Sheriff's Department and two from the Vancouver Police Department; a sergeant (Charles Atkins) from the Sheriff's Department, who coordinates the work of the unit; and two community corrections officers (CCOs) from the Vancouver DOC regional office. The CCOs carry a caseload of 75, of which about 7 or 8 are nongang cases. In addition, a youth outreach coordinator (employed by the Sheriff's Department) develops prevention and support programs. The Anti-Gang Unit staff apply a set of criteria[7] developed by DOC to compile a list of adult gang members who are on community supervision and select from that list those who are deemed to be at high risk of committing new gang-related crimes, those whose compliance with conditions of supervision is slipping, and those who are believed to be engaged in crime. All team members receive a report on each targeted offender that includes his or her photograph, rap sheet, information on known associates (such as fellow gang members), and conditions of supervision. Conditions for gang members typically include night-long curfews; prohibitions against associating with gang members; and bans on gang clothing, colors, or signs. In addition, offenders must abstain from drug or alcohol use and follow their CCO's instructions regarding reporting for and submitting to drug use testing. The detectives and CCOs perform investigative and supervisory duties with respect to their cases. For example, detectives from Vancouver conduct regular police investigations of gang-related crimes that occur in their city. CCOs are responsible for meeting DOC contact standards for gang and nongang offenders on their supervisory caseload. When unit members encounter a gang member in the community, they complete a gang unit street contact card (similar to a field interview report [FIR] card) that contains information about the time, date, location, and circumstances of the contact; the person contacted (name, moniker, tattoos, and description); associates also present; and other information (see figure 1). Unit members enter this information in a PC database program specially designed to organize and analyze data on gangs. They use this database to develop catalogs of gangs and gang membership and summaries of observed activities of different gangs. In addition, the data provide a written record of when and where gang members have been observed, information that can be useful in investigations. Two nights a week, members of the unit conduct joint home visits in high-risk gang cases. A typical team consists of a CCO and a law enforcement officer. However, if unit members think that an offender may try to run, or if they suspect that they may encounter problems during a visit, a larger team (such as two detectives and two CCOs) may conduct the visit. Visits begin between 7 and 9 p.m. and conclude between midnight and 2 a.m. Each team tries to visit 10 to 15 residences per night, although the number varies depending on how many offenders are at home, how many officers are needed to conduct each visit, and the events that transpire during visits. A routine home visit by two officers may take 10 to 15 minutes, but one that requires extensive interrogation and searches may last more than an hour. During all home visits, team members wear body armor, carry flashlights and handcuffs, and wear black windbreakers with "Police," "Probation," or "Sheriff" emblazoned in large reflective letters. Members are equipped with mobile radios to communicate with one another and with the sheriff's dispatcher. CCOs are unarmed, but the detectives carry handguns and pepper spray. When they approach a building, law enforcement members take the lead in assessing danger and establishing security. For example, if the offender has a history of running, law enforcement officers cover all exits. The CCO approaches the door, knocks, and requests permission to enter. Offenders can refuse, but refusal is a violation of their conditions of supervision. To determine whether the person is complying with the conditions, team members interview the offender (if he or she is present) and discuss the person's adjustment with parents, spouses, or significant others who may be present. The CCOs have authority to search the offender and the portion of the residence occupied by the offender. Team members also examine the residence for signs of illegal activity. If they suspect that there is evidence of criminal activity outside the area occupied by the offender, members of the team stay on the premises while a law enforcement officer obtains a search warrant. If team members observe a violation of the law, they can arrest those involved and search the rest of the premises. (See "A Home Visit by Probation Officers.") Team members make a special effort to treat offenders and family members politely and with respect. They try to identify problems offenders may be having that impair their adjustment, and to suggest solutions or sources of help. Once a month the unit hosts a gang intelligence meeting, which usually includes representatives from local police departments along the Pacific coast from metropolitan Seattle (Washington) to Multnomah (Portland), Clackamas, and Washington Counties in Oregon. Representatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), DEA, BATF, and INS also attend. The juvenile probation department, the public school system, and the county attorney may also send representatives. Selected unit members attend several training conferences and seminars on gang issues each year, mostly on the west coast. The Washington Department of Corrections trains community corrections officers on gang issues. Unit members who have gone to training programs are responsible for training colleagues who did not attend. Unit members also train patrol officers in the sheriff's department and Vancouver police departments. The law enforcement members of the unit are trained in entry tactics and weapons. While two members of the unit are former Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team members, the unit members are not SWAT-certified. As a result, if unit members encounter a potentially dangerous situation, they call the local SWAT team rather than try to effect the entry themselves. RESULTS The Anti-Gang Unit has collected data on gang-related incidents and crimes in Clark County each year since 1995. In 1995, there were about 125 gang-related incidents. That number rose to almost 300 in 1996 and to about 450 in 1997. Gang-related crimes during that period rose from 72 in 1995 to 157 in 1996 and 213 in 1997. Three crime categories accounted for much of the increase--malicious mischief (which rose from 3 crimes in 1995 to 58 in 1997), assaults (which rose from 24 in 1995 to 53 in 1997), and robbery (which rose from 6 in 1995 to 23 in 1997). Sergeant Charles Atkins, coordinator of the Anti-Gang Unit, believes these data illustrate an increase in the community's consciousness about gangs, more than real increases in gang activity. That is, the unit and the Anti-Gang Task Force have made members of the public and community institutions more aware of gangs, and so they are now more likely to recognize and report incidents and crimes as gang related. PROJECT ONE VOICE, NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT Project One Voice is a partnership between the New Haven (Connecticut) Police Department and adult and juvenile probation and parole agencies begun in 1997 to provide intensive surveillance for high-risk, gang-involved offenders who are on probation, parole, or pretrial release in two New Haven neighborhoods. HISTORY AND GOALS During the late 1980s, gang-related crime--particularly drug dealing and violence--eroded the quality of life in several New Haven neighborhoods. Residents reportedly feared for their safety and tended to "barricade" themselves in their dwellings. In the early 1990s, local, State, and Federal law enforcement worked together to prosecute and imprison top gang leaders. This effort temporarily reduced gang-related crime, but it also spawned heightened competition for control of drug markets. By 1996, gang-related violence was rising again. The New Haven Police Department (NHPD) has been a pioneer in the implementation of community policing programs. These experiences stimulated criminal justice officials to think more creatively about the effect of criminal justice operations on neighborhoods. They wanted to address the gang problem in ways that would not cause further damage to already devastated neighborhoods. An advisory board representing local, State, and Federal criminal justice agencies planned Project One Voice and oversees its operation. However, the board does not have representatives from the two neighborhoods in which Project One Voice operates. Instead, NHPD has formed neighborhood groups to meet with and advise each of the 10 police substation commanders in those neighborhoods. The department uses the groups in the Newhallville and Fair Haven neighborhoods to educate other residents about Project One Voice and to obtain information on community problems. The goal of Project One Voice is to reduce drug-related and violent crimes in the Newhallville and Fair Haven neighborhoods by providing enhanced supervision of the most criminally active offenders who are on probation, parole, or pretrial release. Because gangs are heavily involved in drug sales in these neighborhoods, most of those targeted for enhanced supervision reportedly are both traffickers and gang members. Offenders are selected for target by Project One Voice, which uses information developed by police and probation via official records, community contacts, or informants. OPERATIONS Probation officers maintain offices at police substations in the two neighborhoods in which Project One Voice now operates. The substations consist of two small wings connected by an entryway. One wing contains a community meeting room, which can seat about 20 persons. The other wing contains a small public area, one private office (for the substation commander), and a room with five desks. As a result, space is at a premium in the substations. It is, therefore, a significant commitment for the police department to provide a desk for one probation officer at each location. Probation officers and New Haven police officers conduct joint operations about twice a week. Typically, one police officer and one probation officer constitute a team for a joint operation. They may patrol the neighborhoods and stop probationers whom they suspect of violating their conditions of supervision. They also may conduct unannounced home visits to confirm residency or curfew compliance. When police officers patrol without probation officers, they carry notebooks containing a sheet on each person targeted by Project One Voice. The notebooks are divided into four sections, one each for offenders on State probation, State parole, pretrial detention, and juvenile probation (officials are considering adding Federal probation as well). The sheets contain a photograph of the offender, his or her name (including aliases and monikers), his or her rap sheet, a list of supervision conditions for the offender, and a list of persons with whom the individual may not associate. The latter list is divided into two columns--one lists fellow gang members and the second lists potential victims (if known). Finally, the sheets contain the name of the offender's probation or parole officer. This notebook enables police to get to know persons on the street more quickly and thoroughly. It also allows the police to watch for probation or parole violations around the clock. Project One Voice is intended to increase the odds that offenders will successfully complete community supervision, not to catch offenders violating conditions of supervision so that their supervision can be revoked and they can be confined. To accomplish this goal, however, officials believe offenders must realize they cannot violate conditions with impunity. As a result, officials try to respond in some way to every documented violation. For example, if police officers observe a violation (such as a curfew violation) they stop the offender and hand him a "palm card," a fluorescent-colored card slightly larger than a 3'' x 5'' index card, which warns the offender in English and Spanish that he or she has been observed violating his or her conditions of supervision (see figure 2). When a palm card is issued, the police officers instruct the offender to report to his or her probation officer the next day. The police officers then file a brief report with the offender's probation or parole officer describing the time and circumstances of the observed violation. If the violation is serious enough, revocation proceedings may begin. If the offender is on pretrial release or probation, the revocation will result in a court hearing. Officials in the police department and on the task force want to make Project One Voice citywide but need additional probation officers to do so. Adult probation services are operated by the Office of Adult Probation (OAP), which is part of the State court system. In the past 2 years, the office suffered budget cuts that forced it to eliminate 50 probation officers statewide. At the same time, the number of offenders on probation increased. These two circumstances have resulted in sharp increases in average probation caseloads in all areas of the State. By committing four probation officers to work on Project One Voice and by giving them reduced caseloads, the average caseload for remaining probation officers in New Haven has increased even more. Nevertheless, Robert Bosco, director of OAP, supports Project One Voice in principle and has agreed to assign more probation officers to expand the program after the State has restored some of the previously cut probation officer positions. RESULTS Like several other enhanced supervision programs, no evaluation of Project One Voice's impact is under way. Nonetheless, probation officers assigned to Project One Voice believe that many probationers, when faced with heightened surveillance and certain responses to detected violations, decide to conform to supervision requirements. Overall revocation rates have not increased since Project One Voice began, but probation officers believe that offenders who persist in violations or who engage in serious violations (for example, possession of weapons) are more likely to be detected and have their probations revoked. At a recent advisory board meeting, New Haven police officers reported that violent and property crimes have declined in both target neighborhoods since Project One Voice began. SMART PARTNERS PROGRAM, BELLEVUE AND REDMOND, WASHINGTON Smart Partners began as a partnership between the Redmond Police Department and the Washington Department of Corrections Regional Community Corrections office in neighboring Bellevue. Smart Partners trains police officers as volunteer probation officers who then conduct home visits for a small caseload of high-risk offenders on community supervision. Smart Partners also has developed innovative ways for police and correctional agencies to share information about persons under community supervision. The program started in 1994 and, by 1998, had expanded to more than 50 cities and counties in Washington State. HISTORY AND GOALS When Steve Marrs, community corrections officer for DOC in Bellevue, Washington, was first assigned to the office, he called a nearby police department for some information. When the other party found out he was talking to a probation officer, he hung up. "I knew then we had a lot of work to do in building bridges," Marrs said. Accordingly, he and his supervisor, Joe Rinaldi, met frequently with law enforcement agencies in the metropolitan Seattle area, emphasizing that community corrections and law enforcement have a common goal of promoting public safety, that they deal with the same offenders, and that they possess information that could be useful to the other if they would only communicate with each other. Marrs and Commander Terry Morgan of the Redmond Police Department then began working on ways the two agencies could exchange information and collaborate to achieve mutual goals more effectively. They noted that when Seattle police officers began conducting saturation patrols in high-crime neighborhoods in the early 1990s, a large percentage of the persons they stopped and interviewed were on probation or parole[8]--almost 70 percent during one saturation patrol. Many individuals were in violation of their conditions of supervision when they were stopped--either because they were in the company of other felons or because they were out after curfew. Under existing practices, CCOs would never have learned of these violations. To Marrs and Morgan, it seemed like a perfect situation for which to work out better information sharing between police and corrections. Their efforts to build bridges between police and corrections were aided by the implementation of community policing by several area law enforcement agencies. This innovation created a climate in which development of partnerships with other agencies was accepted as a high priority. In another similarity with community policing, DOC gave its CCOs freedom to innovate, although this empowerment may have been more passive than affirmative. As Steve Marrs put it, "It's easier to apologize than to ask permission." In other words, CCOs worked with police to develop the program first and sought DOC ratification later. Smart Partners has two goals: (1) to provide additional surveillance of offenders released from prison to community custody and (2) to develop inexpensive and efficient ways for police and community corrections officers to share information about persons under DOC supervision. OPERATIONS Smart Partners consists of three innovations. First, police officers conduct random curfew checks on serious offenders who are released from prison on a form of enhanced supervision called "community custody." DOC recruits and trains local police officers to serve as volunteer CCOs. Each participating police officer is assigned a small caseload of community custody cases. For each case, the police officer gets information about the offender's criminal history, residence, family situation, and conditions of supervision. The officers conduct random home visits, usually once or twice a week, to ensure that community custody offenders are complying with their curfews. The police officers cannot enter the offender's residence without permission. If permission is not given, the police officers report the refusal to the offender's CCO. The refusal is a violation of conditions of the offender's supervision and can be punished by a warning, placement in work release, or return to prison. If they are invited to enter, police officers observe the premises to see if there are any violations of conditions of supervision. If the police officer observes evidence of a crime (e.g., cocaine is in plain sight), the officer can arrest the offender. If the officer observes a violation of a condition of supervision, he or she notifies the offender's CCO. The next business day, the CCO responds to the violation report and informs the police officer of the action taken. Smart Partners' second innovation is a procedure for the police department to notify community corrections officers whenever their officers stop and interrogate (but do not arrest) a person under DOC supervision. When police officers on patrol interview a suspicious person, they submit a field interview report (FIR) card to the department's crime analyst, who reviews it the next day. The crime analyst checks the Washington State Crime Information System (WASCIS) to see if the person is under DOC supervision. If so, WASCIS also identifies the offender's CCO. The innovation is simple and virtually without cost. For each active DOC case, the police crime analyst copies the FIR card and mails or faxes it to the director of the regional DOC office to which the offender's CCO is assigned; the regional director then forwards the copy to the offender's CCO. Even if the offender did not commit a crime, the FIR card might document a violation of a condition of supervision, such as a curfew violation or possession of alcohol. The community corrections officer will call the offender and instruct him or her to appear for an office visit. If the violation is serious enough, community supervision may be revoked and the offender reconfined. Even if the violation is minor, the CCO will take some action to hold the offender accountable. The CCO then notifies the police officer who filed the FIR card of the action taken. This feedback to patrol officers gives them added incentive to be conscientious about completing FIR cards. Officials have no ongoing statewide information on the proportion of FIR cards that involve a subject on community supervision. However, in Aberdeen, Washington, about 480 FIR cards were issued in 1997, and 110 (23 percent) involved persons on community supervision. According to Detective Mike Bagley, 80 of these offenders had their probation revoked and were imprisoned due to a violation documented by the FIR card. Smart Partners' third innovation applies to all offenders under DOC supervision who are arrested and admitted to jail. Jail staff check each arrestee's name against WASCIS criminal history files. When they identify a person under DOC supervision, the jailer faxes a copy of the arrest log to the regional DOC office to which the offender's CCO is assigned. The log identifies the offender, the time and date of his or her jail admission, and the charges. The regional director reviews the faxes every morning and forwards them to the offenders' CCOs. If a case involves particularly serious charges (for example, a habitual violent offender found in possession of a firearm), the regional DOC director may immediately issue a detainer to prevent the offender from being released on bail before the CCO can respond to the violation. Without Smart Partners, community corrections officers would not learn about the arrest of persons in their caseload for weeks or even months due to data entry backlogs. Taken together, Smart Partners' innovations significantly expand the information available to community corrections officers about offenders' compliance with conditions of supervision. The innovations accomplish this with little added burden or cost to the system, at least in terms of immediate personnel costs for police officers, jailers, and CCOs.[9] In addition, the home visits by police officers to offenders in community custody status increase police officers' knowledge about a particularly high-risk group of offenders. Steve Marrs and Terry Morgan have provided free training to more than 50 Washington cities and counties that have replicated Smart Partners. The program is popular among both corrections and law enforcement staff and administrators. As Detective Mike Bagley of Aberdeen, Washington, noted, "Smart Partners is attractive because it's easy, it's cheap, and it works." The experience of partnering has led participating agencies to seek other avenues for cooperation. The Redmond Police Department has set aside office space at the police station for community corrections officers from the Bellevue regional office; colocation will increase dialogue among line staff in both organizations and promote greater information exchange, insights, and understanding. The most valuable offshoot of the Smart Partners program may be a statewide plan to computerize FIR cards. (See "Computerized FIR Cards Will Provide Valuable Investigative Information.") Other enhancements are under discussion. For example, at the request of police officers, DOC is considering establishing the position of community corrections "duty officer." This officer would be on call to law enforcement 24 hours a day. If a suspect in an active DOC case is arrested and jailed, police officers could call the duty officer to describe the nature of the new charge, and the duty officer could determine--without referring the matter to the appropriate regional director or the offender's CCO--if a detainer should be issued immediately. Issuing the detainer immediately could prevent the release of a high-risk offender who was arrested for an incident that is a serious violation of his or her conditions of release but who is able to post cash bail at the first court appearance. RESULTS The Smart Partners program has not been evaluated. The program has been expanded to more than 50 cities and counties in Washington State. Its emphasis on low-cost methods of information sharing may work against evaluation--that is, it would probably cost much more to collect the data needed to evaluate Smart Partners than it costs to operate the program. Steve Marrs argues, however, that an evaluation of the program should be conducted. NEIGHBORHOOD PROBATION, MARICOPA COUNTY, PHOENIX, ARIZONA The Maricopa County Adult Probation Department operates neighborhood-based probation services in the Phoenix area. Each service is a partnership among the probation department, the Phoenix Police Department, and community organizations in the various neighborhoods. HISTORY AND GOALS In 1996, the Maricopa County Adult Probation Department established its first neighborhood probation project in the Coronado district of Phoenix, Arizona. Two other neighborhood probation projects soon followed. The three neighborhood probation projects have two goals: (1) to reduce recidivism and (2) to expand the definition of probation to include providing services to the entire community. OPERATIONS Unlike intensive supervision programs, which define their target populations by offense, the neighborhood probation partnerships define their target populations by preexisting neighborhood boundaries. For example, the Garfield neighborhood probation office targets all probationers living in the Garfield neighborhood of Central Phoenix, an area just over 2 miles in diameter. Targeting established neighborhoods affords the partnerships easier access to community boards and churches.[10] While each of the Maricopa County Adult Probation Department's three neighborhood probation partnerships adjusts its activities to fit the needs of its particular neighborhoods, all perform the following functions: --Each office maintains a strong relationship with local law enforcement. Informally, police officers spend time in the neighborhood probation offices familiarizing themselves with probationers in the neighborhood and discussing cases with probation officers. Formally, police and probation officers coordinate roundups and probationers' participation in community service projects. Police officers also provide backup for probation officers making home visits. In addition, police officers aid in the observation and supervision of probationers. In return, probation officers use their broader search powers to aid in police investigations, and police officers receive increased cooperation from the community because residents know they are working with probation officers. --Each partnership maintains a strong relationship with the community. Probation officers attend all community board meetings. Probation officers and police officers also coordinate projects in which probationers perform their community service in the neighborhood. Sometimes maintaining a strong relationship with the community requires a deep understanding of the neighborhood. Staff from the Garfield Neighborhood Probation office regularly visit and provide services (such as running errands) for several elderly ladies in the area considered the neighborhood "matriarchs." In exchange for these visits, staff receive valuable insights into the history of the neighborhood and the roots of any problems. Like police officers, community members often visit the neighborhood probation offices to talk with the officers about the neighborhood and its issues. --Each partnership maintains a strong relationship with probationers. Geographic proximity allows probation officers more contact with their probationers. In addition, probationers receive supervision from local law enforcement officials who are aware of their conditions of probation. Because they are seen as part of the community, probation and police officers believe that the contacts are more productive and that they have better rapport with the probationers. The community also assists in the supervision of probationers. Because probationers are heavily involved in community service projects, residents see probationers performing valuable services for the neighborhood and, in turn, these residents are more likely to perform services (such as job placement) for the probationers. Probation and police officers from the Coronado Neighborhood Probations partnership described an incident that illustrated how these three functions interact. While attending a neighborhood board meeting, probation officers learned that the single biggest concern for the community was the condition of one particular home. The owner of the home had been accumulating garbage in his back and front yards for years. Community members complained about its appearance and its odor. Furthermore, they believed that the condition of the home was responsible for lowering property values and for discouraging working families from moving into the neighborhood. Police officers explained that they would continue to issue citations, but they could not force the owner to clean his house. The newly established Coronado Neighborhood Probation Office volunteered to have probationers clean the house as part of their community service obligations. The community board was thrilled and volunteered to provide extra equipment and labor, as did the local police precinct. The house was cleaned within a month. RESULTS Maricopa County's neighborhood probation partnerships have not been evaluated. Nonetheless, officials believe the programs are meeting some of their goals. They note that there has been a 45-percent decrease in crime in the Coronado neighborhood, and that turnover is lower among neighborhood probation officers than among traditional probation officers. NOTES 1. Operation Night Light will be described more fully in the National Institute of Corrections' forthcoming monograph. However, administrators from many of the enhanced supervision programs described in this chapter visited the program during the planning stages of their own projects. Because of its importance in the development of similar programs, this section briefly summarizes Operation Night Light's key features. 2. Corbett, Ronald P., "Probation Blue: The Promise (and Perils) of Probation-Police Partnerships," in Correctional Management Quarterly 2 (3) (Spring 1998): 31-39. 3. For example, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) selected Boston to be one of six sites for a major antiviolence program for urban youths. In addition, Boston has a vigorous community policing program linked to a community board that seeks to enlist and revitalize neighborhood organizations so they can identify problems and help reduce crime. The police department has also taken special steps to reduce the number and availability of handguns on the street. 4. Corbett, 31-39. 5. Ibid. 6. Probationers visited by MAVI teams are not usually on the caseloads of the MAVI probation officers. Probation officers from the entire department submit requests to MAVI asking that a probationer be placed on the visitation list. 7. To be designated gang affiliated, Washington DOC policy requires that an offender must meet two of the following criteria: --Admits or asserts affiliation with a criminal gang. --Has been identified as an individual affiliated with a --criminal gang based on reliable information; an informant; or a law enforcement agency, including out-of-State or Federal agencies. --Uses hand signs or language, the content and context of which clearly indicates gang affiliation. --Displays clothing, jewelry, or tattoos unique to gang affiliation (clothing color alone is not sufficient). --Accompanies an identified gang affiliate during the preparation for, or commission of, a crime. --Conspires to commit crimes against persons or property based on race, color, religion, sexual preference, national origin, or rival gang association. 8. Even though probation and parole technically no longer exist in the State of Washington, this case study uses "probation" and "parole" as generic terms because they are widely understood by criminal justice practitioners. Washington's 1990 Sentencing Reform Act replaced "probation" with "community supervision" and "parole" with "community placement." When serious violent offenders are released after serving their prison terms, they are placed in "community custody," a form of intensive supervision. 9. The program's effect on system resources--for example, whether Smart Partners significantly increases revocations and reimprisonment or costs for prosecutors, courts, and prisons--has not been determined. 10. Churches are the primary community centers in most neighborhoods in the Southwest, especially in Hispanic neighborhoods. Maricopa County Probation works within this tradition, going as far as to house Coronado Neighborhood Probations in a church basement. ------------------------------- Enhanced Supervision Programs Draw From ISP and Neighborhood-Based Probation Many enhanced supervision programs contain elements of two prior correctional reforms: neighborhood-based supervision and intensive supervision. Neighborhood-Based Supervision In the late 1960s and early 1970s, many jurisdictions decentralized the delivery of probation into neighborhood or storefront offices so that probation officers' caseloads were defined by geographic boundaries. This was intended to: --Reduce barriers to supervision by placing probation officers in the neighborhoods where their clients lived. --Increase probation officers' knowledge of the neighborhood. --Improve offenders' access to social services (often, probation and welfare or other social services would place staff in the same facility). Police and probation officers did not collaborate in these neighborhood service delivery efforts. Later, as budgets for social services and probation were trimmed, decentralization seemed too expensive. As a result, many jurisdictions abandoned the neighborhood-based approach. Intensive Supervision Intensive supervision programs (ISPs) were a popular innovation in the 1980s. Offenders on ISP had to obey more conditions of supervision, and probation officers contacted them more often to monitor compliance. Advocates argued that ISP would build public support by making probation more punitive and would better protect the public by allowing probation or parole officers to detect violations more quickly. To allow more contacts, ISP caseloads were smaller than regular supervision caseloads. This made ISP more costly per supervised offender, and most advocates argued, therefore, that ISP should be used only for high-risk cases. While ISP was successful in building political support, evaluations showed that many jurisdictions used ISP for low-risk offenders. For these cases, ISPs greatly increased revocations for technical violations but did not significantly reduce the rate of new crimes by persons on ISP.[a] One study found that, when used for high-risk offenders, intensive supervision programs that combined surveillance and treatment lowered the rate of new crimes.[b] Notes a. Petersilia, Joan and Turner, Susan, Intensive Probation Supervision for High-Risk Offenders: Findings from Three California Experiments, Santa Monica, California: The Rand Corporation, 1990. b. Byrne, James M. and Kelly, Linda. Restructuring Probation as an Intermediate Sanction: An Education of the Massachusetts Intensive Probation Program. Final report to the National Institute of Justice. Lowell, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts, Lowell, 1989. ------------------------------- A Home Visit by Probation Officers During the Clark County site visit for this report, the Anti-Gang Unit conducted a home visit to an apartment where a probationer lived with his mother. The young man had fled the scene when the unit last checked on him. All six unit members participated in order to cover all exits. When the CCO rang the doorbell and announced the visit, the offender opened a second floor window and prepared to jump. However, he was met by a flashlight beam and a firm instruction from one of the detectives to close the window. After they were admitted to the apartment, the probation officers found that the offender had been drinking and was accompanied by a person with whom he was forbidden to associate. The offender was given a Breathalyzer[Trade Mark] test, which indicated he was intoxicated. He was arrested and handcuffed. Unit members searched the probationer's room in the apartment but found nothing other than the alcohol. When they began the search, the probationer's mother protested. One of the probation officers said to her, "You used to be on probation. You know how this goes." The mother responded angrily, "No probation officer ever came to my house!" Four team members departed to conduct other home visits, while two remained with the offender to await a sheriff's transportation unit, which took him to jail. The visit took about 45 minutes to complete. ------------------------------- Computerized FIR Cards Will Provide Valuable Investigative Information In the past, there was no way for police in one community in Washington State to know about FIR cards written in another. Once police began sharing FIR cards with community corrections officers, officials recognized how important the information could be for investigators in other agencies. As a result, law enforcement and corrections officials met with staff from the State Attorney General's Office to explore computerizing FIR card data. The Attorney General operates the Homicide Investigation Tracking System (HITS), which initially was established to help local police investigate serial killings. The HITS system links several local, State, and Federal databases and enables investigators to make structured queries to develop lists of suspects. For example, if police are investigating a series of rape-murders, they can ask HITS to list the names of all known sex offenders who live within 6 miles of where each body was found. If two or three names appear on multiple lists, these persons become prime targets for investigation. Because of its success in helping to solve serial killings, HITS has been expanded to include serial rapes and other serious violent crimes. In 1997, the Washington Legislature appropriated $850,000, and the Department of Corrections and the State Police reallocated additional funds to allow the Attorney General to enter FIR card data into HITS. When the system is fully operational, police will complete "virtual" FIR cards on laptop computers in their patrol cars. The data will be uploaded by radio modem to HITS, where it will be instantly available for analysis by any law enforcement agency. For example, if a crime is committed in Bellevue, Washington, at 2 a.m. by an overweight, bearded man wearing a yellow jacket and driving a green pickup truck, police officers from Bellevue could query the HITS FIR card file to see if any patrol officers in the surrounding communities had written a FIR card on someone fitting that description the previous night or at any time in the recent past. While participation in the system will be voluntary, officials expect that the ability to share and query such a rich source of investigative information will be a powerful inducement to police agencies to participate. When the FIR card data has been entered into HITS, the system will immediately e-mail copies of the cards for all active DOC cases to offenders' community corrections officers. This will eliminate the delay in manually transmitting the cards; community corrections officers will get the information in "real time" if they are on duty and the next business morning if the message arrives when they are off duty. Smart Partners' second component will have become fully automated and will be more uniformly available across the State. ------------------------------- C H A P T E R 3: OTHER POLICE-CORRECTIONS PARTNERSHIPS This chapter describes four types of police-corrections partnerships other than enhanced supervision programs: (1) fugitive apprehension units, (2) information-sharing partnerships, (3) specialized enforcement partnerships, and (4) interagency problem-solving partnerships. FUGITIVE APPREHENSION UNITS Until recently, most probation and parole agencies issued arrest warrants when offenders absconded, but the warrants were likely to be executed only if police arrested absconders on new charges or stopped them for either a traffic violation or a field interview and checked for outstanding arrest warrants.[1] The number of absconders never grew very large because in most States sentences continued to run, and could eventually expire, while absconders were still at large. Some parole agencies even had informal policies under which they discharged the sentences for absconders if they remained arrest-free for a specified number of years.[2] In the late 1980s, legislatures began passing laws that tolled sentences-- that is, stopped giving credits for serving a sentence--as soon as offenders absconded from supervision.[3] As a result, the number of absconders grew rapidly, and probation and parole agencies faced growing pressure to take action. By the early 1990s, several agencies had established specialized fugitive apprehension units.[4] Most of these units are internal, involving only staff from the probation or parole agency. Fugitive apprehension units that work in partnership with police are less common. Two such units are located in California and one in Minnesota. Table 3 compares relevant features of these three partnerships. PAROLEE-AT-LARGE APPREHENSION TEAMS, CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS Parolee-At-Large (PAL) Apprehension Teams are partnerships between the Parole and Community Services Division of the California Department of Corrections (CDC) and Federal, State and local law enforcement agencies designed to locate and apprehend parole absconders. They share information on absconders, share resources, and conduct periodic joint operations. HISTORY AND GOALS According to Marisela Montes, Director of the Parole Division, the number of parolees-at-large (parolees with whom parole agents had not had contact for more than 30 days) in California grew from 2,698 in 1983 to more than 17,000 in 1995. The Parole and Community Services Division had been unable to focus efforts on recapturing parolees-at-large due to a lack of resources. Funding for parole in California is based on the size of the division's active parolee caseload. When parolees abscond, a warrant is issued, and their parole is suspended. At that time, the cases of parolees-at-large become "inactive" and no longer part of the funding base. Therefore, if the division had embarked on a large-scale effort to recapture absconders, money to support that effort would have had to be diverted from funds used to supervise active cases. In 1996, California's Parole and Community Services Law Enforcement Consortium became concerned that parolees-at-large were a serious threat to public safety because their numbers were increasing and more than 21 percent of them were classified as serious or violent sex offenders. The consortium recommended that the division reduce the number of parolees-at-large. CDC obtained legislative funding to create the PAL Apprehension Teams project, which coordinates Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies' efforts to locate and capture absconders. The PAL Apprehension Teams project has four goals: --Reduce the number of parolees-at-large. --Reduce reoffending by parolees-at-large. --Develop information sharing between DOC and Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies. --Develop "cooperative law enforcement practices" among the division; CDC; and Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies. Although the PAL Apprehension Teams project targets all parolees-at-large, it focuses on locating and apprehending the most serious and violent offenders, including those convicted of murder, manslaughter, and mayhem. OPERATIONS PAL Apprehension Teams were established in eight locations in California. Team size varies from two to six agents, with supervisors overseeing operations and a statewide administrator managing the entire organization. Unlike other parole agents, PAL Apprehension Team staff do not carry active caseloads--their sole assignment is to find and apprehend parolees-at-large. Willingness to commit this level of resources to the PAL Apprehension Teams project is evidence of CDC's commitment to return absconders to supervision. CDC recognized from the start that it would need cooperation from law enforcement to achieve the PAL Apprehension Teams' goals. As a result, each PAL Apprehension Team was charged with establishing partnerships with Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies. These partnerships focus on improving the flow of information about parolees-at-large. Local police sometimes have information to share with parole agents on where an absconder was last seen, with whom he or she associates, or other information that will help PAL Apprehension Teams capture the person safely. PAL Apprehension Teams routinely apprehend absconders without assistance from law enforcement. However, if a team expects a serious problem when arresting an absconder, it may conduct a joint apprehension with local law enforcement officers. In addition, if problems develop during an apprehension, PAL Apprehension Teams can call the local police department for backup. PAL Apprehension Teams periodically conduct joint sweeps with law enforcement in neighborhoods where many parolees-at-large are thought to reside. The teams will prepare a list of absconders (with their presumed addresses) whom they want to capture and then, along with police officers, move from one address to the next. In the course of these operations, the team may encounter parolees who have not absconded but who are violating conditions of their release. If so, the team may arrest these nonfugitive parolees. PAL Apprehension Team members receive extensive training (more than 200 hours in the first year) in tactical entry techniques, firearms, and investigations. They wear bulletproof vests and carry radios that link them with each other and with police for backup. Parole agents in California (including those on the PAL Apprehension Teams) carry firearms. RESULTS In its first year of operation, the PAL Apprehension Teams project arrested 2,125 parolees-at-large. Parole administrator Richard Rimmer estimates that parolee-at-large cases were reduced by more than 1,000 from projected 1996-97 levels. PAL Apprehension Teams also seized more than 300 firearms. Unit supervisor Roy Chu points out, "This was accomplished without injury to parole agents or their law enforcement partners, and without a single public complaint or lawsuit." FUGITIVE RECOVERY ENFORCEMENT TEAM, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA The Fugitive Recovery Enforcement Team (F.R.E.T.), a partnership between the San Francisco Police Department and the Parole and Community Services Division of CDC, is designed to locate and apprehend parole violators and parolees wanted for new crimes. HISTORY AND GOALS In 1993, to reduce the number of crimes committed in the San Francisco area by parolees with outstanding warrants, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) invited the Parole and Community Services Division, the San Francisco Sheriff's Department, and the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to participate in a Parole Task Force Committee. One of the committee's recommendations was for these agencies to form a Fugitive Recovery Enforcement Team--F.R.E.T. According to the June 1995 Fugitive Recovery Enforcement Team (F.R.E.T.) Program--Update and Report, "The Parole Division's goal is to control crime through the apprehension of targeted parole violators and to bring these violators back under stringent supervision, refer them to needed detoxification programs, or present a referral to the Board of Prison Terms for revocation purposes." OPERATIONS When F.R.E.T. was created, there was substantial misunderstanding and distrust between police and parole officers. For example, some parole agents believed that police officers harassed parolees, and some police officers felt that parole agents ignored rather than prevented new crimes by parolees. As a result, much effort initially went into correcting these and other misperceptions. According to parole agent Merline Taira and SFPD Sergeant Steve Bosshard, careful selection of F.R.E.T. staff and open communication among them have been keys to overcoming these misunderstandings and distrust. They suggest choosing staff who are proactive rather than reactive, and who volunteer to work on the project. They provide cross-training to ensure each team member understands the other's job. Three times a month, San Francisco police officers and agents from the Parole and Community Services Division engage in joint operations termed "sweeps" to serve arrest warrants to parole absconders. The police department provides the law enforcement equipment, patrol cars, and police vans, and handles the bookings. The Parole and Community Services Division provides the warrants, information on the last known addresses of the parolees, and parole agents to sign the revocation paperwork. SFPD has assigned two full-time officers to F.R.E.T., as well as a F.R.E.T. coordinator. The Parole and Community Services Division has a full-time F.R.E.T. field coordinator who ensures that the Parole Division's functions are performed. These include photographing newly released parolees, maintaining a database of released parolees, and assigning parole agents to sweeps. RESULTS Between 1993 and 1997, F.R.E.T. officers arrested more than 5,000 parolees-at-large. During this time, San Francisco's parolees-at-large population dropped by 12 percent. FUGITIVE APPREHENSION PROGRAM, HENNEPIN COUNTY (MINNESOTA) DEPARTMENT OF COMMUNITY CORRECTIONS The Fugitive Apprehension Program (FAP) is a partnership among the Hennepin County Department of Community Corrections, the Hennepin County Sheriff, and the Minneapolis and St. Paul Police Departments. It is designed to locate parole and probation absconders, apprehend them, and return them to custody and supervision. HISTORY AND GOALS The Hennepin County Department of Community Corrections initiated FAP in 1982 when local officials realized that 60 percent of parole fugitives in Minnesota lived in Hennepin County. Two-thirds of these absconders were violent offenders and, as such, were believed to pose a considerable danger to society. Prior to the creation of FAP, the Hennepin County Department of Community Corrections filed arrest warrants on absconders but made no other effort to locate or return them to supervision. The Department of Community Corrections[5] developed the partnership with the Hennepin County Sheriff's Department and the Minneapolis and St. Paul Police Departments. FAP has three goals: --Increase the Hennepin County Department of Community Corrections' accountability for probation and parole absconders. --Establish a presence in the community that would deter parolees and probationers from absconding. --Return fugitives from probation and parole to custody and supervision. OPERATIONS FAP gives high priority to apprehending fugitive parolees who: --Have committed offenses involving injury or attempted injury (or use of weapons) and also have been convicted of a prior crime involving injury. --Are mentally ill and dangerous. --Are repeat sex offenders. Two parole/probation officers are assigned to FAP. When a fugitive notice is received, they begin collecting information (e.g., from the fugitive's probation or parole officer, family members, employers, and acquaintances) about the individual's possible whereabouts. Once a fugitive is located, FAP parole/probation officers decide how the arrest will be executed. They are outfitted with bullet-proof vests, police radios, and pepper spray but do not carry firearms. The two FAP officers assess the risk the fugitive will pose during arrest. If they believe the fugitive may resist arrest, police and FAP officers conduct a joint operation to effect the arrest. Most arrests are executed without incident, but if unanticipated problems develop, the police partners respond quickly to radio calls for assistance. Jack Hughes, lead probation officer, recalled one arrest in which the fugitive broke free and began running down the street. The parole officer called for police backup on his radio, and three squad cars arrived before the fugitive had covered one block. FAP's administrative tasks are coordinated by a full-time support staff person responsible for logging warrants, alerting local law enforcement about active warrants, and clearing processed warrants from the system. In addition, this person assists investigations by searching national criminal databases and obtaining warrants to access unlisted phone numbers and trace calls. RESULTS Jack Hughes noted that probation/parole officers "have to participate in searches or our credibility with law enforcement is shot." Once the Hennepin County Department of Community Corrections demonstrated its commitment to seeking out and apprehending absconders, law enforcement agencies became more willing to provide backup as needed in routine cases and direct assistance in high-risk cases. The program has been operating for more than 15 years and has matured to the point where both police and corrections officials view their collaboration as standard procedure. There has not been a formal outcome evaluation of FAP. INFORMATION-SHARING PARTNERSHIPS Several partnerships specialize in information sharing between police and correctional agencies. These partnerships include programs that develop information on sex offenders in the community and gangs in prisons. SEX OFFENDER REGISTRATION AND NOTIFICATION, WASHINGTON STATE DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS The Washington Department of Corrections (DOC) notifies local law enforcement agencies before sex offenders are released from prison and placed in their jurisdiction. DOC also works with local law enforcement agencies to conduct notification meetings with local residents when predatory sex offenders are released into a community. HISTORY AND GOALS In 1990, the Washington Legislature enacted the Community Protection Act, the Nation's first sex offender registration law. The law requires DOC to classify sex offenders by risk level and to notify local law enforcement agencies (and for high-risk cases, the community) before sex offenders are released from prison. For high-risk sex offenders, the law requires community notification meetings to be held. In addition, sex offenders must register with the law enforcement agency in the community where they are placed, and police officers must conduct periodic checks to confirm the sex offender's residency. The goals of the program are to enhance public safety by notifying law enforcement, other public officials, and citizens about the impending release of sex offenders who have completed their prison terms, and to educate the public by working with local police agencies to conduct community meetings in areas where high-risk sex offenders are being released. OPERATIONS DOC's Community Protection Unit uses a risk-based classification system to sort sex offenders into three categories; --Level A cases (the lowest risk level) require that DOC send to the local law enforcement agency a pictorial and narrative file describing the offense, offender, release plan, and supervision requirements. The public must request access to the notification documents from local police. --Level B cases require the same basic notification treatment as Level A cases, but DOC also will notify community agencies and organizations-- for example, public schools, day care centers, park departments, and scouting organizations. In some cases, DOC will also notify residents in the neighborhood immediately surrounding the offender's proposed residence. --Level C cases (the highest risk level) require the notifications provided for Levels A and B. In addition, DOC and local law enforcement jointly conduct a community meeting for each Level C offender. The meeting is publicized more broadly (for example, via notices sent to local newspapers), and more community residents are notified directly. Because sex offenders released from prison are in DOC's community custody, they are intensively supervised by community corrections officers, who also do random home visits to monitor compliance with the offenders' conditions of supervision. The community notification meetings are intended to convey information to the public about sex offenders generally and about the processes by which they are supervised and controlled in the community. Relatively little time is spent discussing the specifics of the individual offender's case. The meetings also are intended to persuade the public that they are better protected under the new law by having police and corrections collaborate in the supervision of sex offenders and by having the public aware of the presence of sex offenders in the community. By easing residents' fears, officials hope to prevent vigilantism. DOC operates sex offender supervision units within each of its 13 regional offices, and each unit has a community corrections officer who specializes in supervising sex offenders. These officers attend the community meetings with the police officers to answer residents' questions. They also are available to help train staff in schools and other community organizations on issues relating to sex offenders. RESULTS Between 1990 and 1996, 942 community notification meetings were held in the State of Washington. A 1997 survey of Washington residents[6] found that the vast majority of respondents were frightened or angered by learning via the notification process about convicted sex offenders living in their communities and believed they were more safety conscious as a result. Most respondents, however, indicated that the notification law had no effect on their routine behavior, such as going out at night or leaving their children home with babysitters. In addition: --Eight of 10 thought the notification law was very important. --Three-fourths thought they had learned more about sex offenses and offenders because of the notification law. --Two-thirds thought steps should be taken to avoid harassing released sex offenders. --Six of 10 thought the notification law made released sex offenders behave better. --A majority thought police did a good job of notifying citizens and dealing appropriately with their reactions when sex offenders were released into their communities. These findings suggest that the community notification meetings have had a positive effect on the public's knowledge of and attitudes toward released sex offenders. SERIOUS HABITUAL OFFENDER PROGRAM, CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE The Serious Habitual Offender Program (SHOP) operates a central database on habitual sex offenders that includes information from several different State and local agencies. The program shares these data with law enforcement and correctional agencies to help them deal with serious offenders. HISTORY AND GOALS In 1989, the California legislature required the California Department of Justice (CDOJ) to establish a central database of serious and habitual sex offenders and to share the information with law enforcement agencies, corrections, probation and parole, prosecutors, and criminal courts. To implement the law, CDOJ established SHOP as a partnership between the Parole and Community Services Division of the California Department of Corrections; CDOJ, and local, State, and Federal law enforcement agencies. SHOP has three goals: --Identify serious and habitual sex offenders. --Maintain a database of habitual sexual offenders. --Disseminate information about habitual sexual offenders "to appropriate criminal justice agencies in a timely fashion in order to identify, apprehend, prosecute, and sentence serious habitual sex offenders." OPERATIONS SHOP screens the CDOJ's Sex Offender Registration File to identify habitual sex offenders. SHOP gathers supplementary information on these individuals and disseminates it to the entire California criminal justice system to aid surveillance, apprehension, and prosecution. To do this, SHOP collaborates with several other agencies: --CDOJ, which provides criminal history summaries of all habitual sex offenders and interviews them when they return to prison to provide additional information about their release. --Police agencies, which record their interactions with habitual sex offenders and transmit the information to CDOJ. In addition, police officers confirm habitual sex offenders' residences of record and notify CDOJ and the district attorney when habitual sex offenders are arrested. --Each district attorney's office, which designates a single prosecutor to handle all habitual sex offenders' prosecutions in the jurisdiction. --The Department of Motor Vehicles, which gives SHOP the driver's license and motor vehicle registration records of habitual sex offenders. SHOP shares this information with: --Police, to inform them about habitual sex offenders in their jurisdictions and to aid in the investigations of unsolved sex crimes. --District attorneys, to help them handle bail hearings for and prosecutions of habitual sex offenders. --Courts, to help judges determine appropriate sentences for habitual sex offenders who are reconvicted. PRISON ANTI-GANG PARTNERSHIPS Gangs pose a serious threat to safety and security in prisons, endangering both staff and inmates. Unless officials take vigorous steps to control and suppress gangs, prisons are fertile grounds in which gangs can flourish. When they are released from prison, gang-involved offenders can help spread gang activity into new areas or can revitalize gangs in neighborhoods where they had been suppressed by vigorous enforcement efforts. The need for information is two way. Prison officials need information about the gang-involvement of incoming inmates. Law enforcement and parole agencies also need to know when gang-involved offenders are released from prison, either at the end of their sentences or when they are on parole or other conditional release. This section describes two police-corrections partnerships that involve sharing information about offenders' involvement in gangs. WASHINGTON STATE PRISON ANTI-GANG PROGRAM In the past, gangs that were active in the Washington State Penitentiary were ones that formed in the facility. Beginning in the late 1980s, however, street gangs began being "imported" into the penitentiary and thereafter grew to dominate gang activity in the facility. As street gangs flourished inside the facility, penitentiary officials soon found themselves without adequate intelligence information. As a result, Sergeant William Riley, selected to run the penitentiary's Gang Intelligence Program in 1990, developed an informal partnership between the Washington DOC and local law enforcement agencies on the west coast that is based on mutual exchange of information. Riley developed personal contacts with 230 officials in 35 law enforcement agencies with whom he communicates regularly to exchange information. He sends these contacts DOC's validated gang list and alerts them when a gang-involved inmate is about to be released to their area. In exchange, the agencies send him information developed locally on the gang affiliation and activities of persons from their areas who are admitted to the Washington State Penitentiary. In larger police departments, Riley cultivates contacts in anti-gang units whose staff typically have detailed information on local gangs and gang members. However, in smaller departments, he usually deals with detectives in major crimes units who, because they cope with many other issues in addition to gangs, generally are able to provide less detailed and specific information. Obtaining gang intelligence is further complicated by the lack of consistent terminology to describe gang activity and by different definitions of gang membership among different police agencies. As a result, Riley spends a great deal of time "transposing" information from different law enforcement terms and formats into those used by DOC. According to Riley, "More formalized approaches are needed to move law enforcement towards standard terms, definitions, and formats for gang intelligence." Riley provides his information to prison staff who are responsible for classification and internal intelligence. He also maps the housing of gang members within the penitentiary. This visual aid helps administrators avoid overloading one housing unit with too many members of one gang, which would give the gang a de facto "turf" within the prison. CONNECTICUT DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS ANTI-GANG PROGRAM The Connecticut Department of Corrections (DOC) has taken tough steps to limit gang activity and gang-related violence in its prisons. No Connecticut inmate who has been identified as gang involved is eligible for early conditional release from prison until he or she has completed a special anti-gang program, signed a gang renunciation agreement, and refrained from subsequent gang activity during the remainder of his or her confinement. The department has been able to protect inmates who renounce gang membership from reprisals by other gang members. Since the program began, officials report there have been only a handful of assaults and no serious injuries or deaths of inmates who have signed renunciation agreements. The department uses available information to classify gang-involved inmates into three categories: (1) marginally involved (e.g., "wannabes") (2) active members, and (3) leaders. Marginally involved gang members are housed in the general population but are supervised more closely. They are required to complete anti-gang programming and to sign a gang renunciation agreement. Active gang members are housed in closed units (they do not mix with the general population) and must complete three phases of anti-gang programming and sign a renunciation agreement before they can return to the general population. If they commit infractions, they could be required to reenter the program. Gang leaders are transferred to a special high-security facility and are confined under restrictive conditions that prevent them from exercising gang leadership while imprisoned. The department's classification decisions are based primarily on information supplied by law enforcement agencies. The department initiated contacts with local law enforcement agencies in 1994, when it began notifying them about the pending release of inmates. This practice allowed the department to identify a contact person in each local law enforcement agency. When an inmate is sentenced to prison, DOC officials call the appropriate police contact person to obtain details about the new inmate's gang involvement, if any. If the inmate is gang involved, the department official asks the contact person to send a letter documenting the relevant information. For example, a local law enforcement contact person might note that an offender was carrying jewelry with a gang insignia, was wearing gang colors, was arrested in the company of three persons known to be members of the same gang, and had been identified as active in a gang by his or her local anti-gang strike force for the past 3 years. Over time, a spirit of reciprocity has emerged in which information sharing has expanded in both directions. There are no legal impediments to information sharing between corrections and law enforcement on adult offenders. According to Captain Louis Irizarry, the biggest problem is that those with the best knowledge of local gang scenes often work different hours than institutional DOC staff, making it more difficult to communicate by telephone. It also is difficult to keep the list of contacts current, particularly in smaller communities, which commit fewer inmates. Finally, Captain Irizarry thinks many law enforcement contacts do not fully understand the department's program--for example, that it involves anti-gang programming leading to formal renunciation--because the department has not had the opportunity to publicize its activities with law enforcement. The program has, however, had considerable influence on other correctional agencies. To date, officials from more than 30 jurisdictions have visited Connecticut to observe the anti-gang program, and several have implemented similar programs upon their return home. SPECIALIZED ENFORCEMENT PARTNERSHIP: OPERATION REVITALIZATION, VALLEJO, CALIFORNIA Operation Revitalization differs from some enhanced supervision programs (described in chapter 2) by giving equal emphasis to community-based antidrug and anti-gang programs, interventions to increase access to treatment services, suppression of violent street crime, and community policing to solve neighborhood problems. Its prevention and intervention activities focus on school-aged children and youths from a single high-crime neighborhood. Its suppression activities target violent street criminals. Operation Revitalization started with a $400,000 grant awarded on a competitive basis by California's Office of Criminal Justice Planning. The Vallejo Police Department coordinated the efforts of a broad-based coalition of community agencies to prepare and submit the winning proposal. The resulting partnership consists of 13 organizations and agencies, including the: --Parole and Community Services Division. --Vallejo Police Department. --Vallejo City Unified School District. --Solano County District Attorney's Office. --Solano County Probation Department. --City of Vallejo Code Enforcement. --Greater Vallejo Recreation District. --Fighting Back Partnership. --Solano-Napa Rental Housing Association. --Federation of Employed Latin American Descendants. --Youth and Family Services of Solano County. --Family Resource Center. --Alcohol Policy Coalition. Six of the agencies involved in the partnership are nongovernmental, community-based agencies with strong neighborhood ties and community acceptance. Operation Revitalization has four elements: --A suppression strategy that utilizes "law enforcement, adjudication, prosecution, and supervision activities" to combat violent street crimes. --A community-oriented policing strategy that works to establish cooperative relationships between law enforcement agencies and the target neighborhood. --A school component that brings antidrug and antiviolence curriculums into classrooms, trains school staff in intervention strategies and techniques, and establishes a community referral program. --Community-oriented prevention, intervention, and treatment services that provide community programs, youth services, and afterschool care to "develop positive community attitudes towards combating narcotics use." INTERAGENCY PROBLEM-SOLVING PARTNERSHIP: THE PAROLE AND COMMUNITY SERVICES LAW ENFORCEMENT CONSORTIUM, CALIFORNIA The Parole and Community Services Law Enforcement Consortium is a quarterly forum in which all major law enforcement and corrections organizations in California confer to identify problems of mutual concern and to identify possible solutions. HISTORY AND GOALS In 1994, officials in the Parole and Community Services Division of the California Department of Corrections became concerned that a lack of accurate information about parole operations and policies, and poor communication between police agencies and the division, were causing law enforcement and correctional agencies to become antagonists. Accordingly, in 1994 they invited law enforcement and correctional organizations to form a consortium. The goals of the consortium are to: --Promote the exchange of more accurate and complete information among the members. --Provide a forum for the discussion of mutual concerns. --Strengthen relationships among them by building stronger partnerships. OPERATIONS The following agencies and organizations constitute the consortium's 26 members: --Youth and Adult Correctional Agency (7 representatives). --Department of Justice (2). --Chief Probation Officers of California (3). --California Peace Officer's Association (3). --California State Sheriff's Association (3). --California Police Chiefs Association (4). --California District Attorneys Association (3). --Governor's Law Enforcement Liaison (1). Each agency or organization selected its representative(s). The Youth and Adult Correctional Agency--an umbrella agency encompassing the Board of Corrections, Department of Corrections, Narcotic Addict Evaluation Authority, Department of Youth Authority, Board of Prison Terms, and Youthful Offender Parole Board--named top officials to represent it, underscoring the importance of the consortium to the agency. The Parole and Community Services Division hosts the quarterly meetings (held in Sacramento due to its central location) and handles the logistical details. It has made a conscious effort to keep the organization informal and flexible. For example, although the division prepares an agenda for each meeting, representatives can raise any issue for discussion. At the outset, the consortium embarked on an "educational" effort that was intended to identify and correct misperceptions among members. Sometimes agencies made formal presentations. For example, at one early meeting, the Parole and Community Services Division gave a 2-hour presentation on how parole operates. The consortium also has cross-trained representatives by sending law enforcement personnel to a corrections conference and vice versa. The division arranges these sessions to promote the realization that all parties share the goal of protecting the public and to ensure that the consortium works with a common base of accurate information about its partners. As the consortium has matured, participants have devoted more time to identifying problems and developing initiatives to resolve them. Between meetings, committees convene as needed to work on particular topics or problems and report their progress and recommendations at subsequent meetings. As discussed below, the consortium has had major accomplishments in four areas: --Reforming practices on the placement of parolees. --Increasing apprehensions of parolees-at-large. --Developing a low-cost means of sharing parole data with police. --Developing a training video on parole and local law enforcement partnerships. Parolee placement. Under former policy, the division placed parolees in the county in which they were committed. Thus, if an offender lived in county A but was imprisoned for a crime committed in county B, when paroled, the offender would be placed in county B. Local officials began referring to such offenders as "imported" parolees. In early consortium meetings, it became clear that officials in many California counties thought they received more than their fair share of imported parolees. The division studied the issue and found that the problem was not as widespread or as serious as the initial rhetoric had suggested. Nonetheless, it also confirmed that there was a legitimate concern about imbalance in parolee placement--in one extreme case, 80 percent of one rural county's parolees were "imported"--and therefore a need to reexamine basic division policy. As a result, the division overhauled its parolee placement policies. Under the new policy, parolees are placed in the county in which they had their last legal residence (staff can make exceptions for exceptional situations described in the policy). In addition, the division set a goal that no more than 5 percent of parolees placed in a county should be "imports." The new policy took effect in July 1997, and by October 1997 the 5-percent goal reportedly had been achieved. Apprehending absconders. The consortium decided that recapturing parolees-at-large was a high priority. The consortium and the division drew up a plan to set up PAL Apprehension Teams in eight locations in the State. With support from consortium organizations, a legislative appropriation was secured to fund new parole agent positions for these teams. As noted previously, the teams were able to reduce the parolee-at-large population by more than 1,000 in their first year of operation. Parole-law enforcement automated data system. The consortium, noting that law enforcement agencies could not easily obtain data maintained by the division about parolees, established a committee to explore ways of providing this access. The committee found that a dedicated information system would be expensive--averaging about $50,000 for each participating law enforcement agency. It began searching for less expensive options, eventually settling on providing access via a secure public Internet connection. The division began developing a pilot program in April 1996, which went online statewide in May 1997. As of April 1998, the division had trained more than 1,388 law enforcement staff from more than 156 agencies to use the system and had scheduled another 714 staff for future training. This innovation received an award from the National Association of State Information Resources Executives. Training video. Peace Officer Standards and Training, in cooperation with the Parole Division, commissioned a video production team to create a training video for local law enforcement. The video uses vignettes from real police experiences (such as a shootout with a fugitive parolee) to illustrate how better communication and information sharing between police and corrections can make working conditions safer for both police and parole officers. The 2-hour Peace Officer Standards and Training-certified video can be used as part of accredited inservice training programs for local law enforcement officers.[7] CONCLUSION The partnerships described in this chapter vary. They range from a single line staff member within a prison who has cultivated personal working relationships with scores of law enforcement officers in several States to an ongoing collaboration of top agency officials and leaders of key criminal justice organizations. The partnerships range from programs whose modest costs were covered by the partners' existing operational budget to programs whose successful prototypes convinced legislatures to fund improvements and expansions to a program that required a substantial new appropriation to get started. In terms of scope, the partnerships may affect a single community, a county or groups of neighboring counties, entire States, and even multistate regions. This suggests that police-corrections partnerships may be a viable tool to solve a wide range of mutual problems and provide mutual benefits for the partners. NOTES 1. Parent, Dale G., Structuring Responses to Probation and Parole Violations, Issues and Practices, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, 1993. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Under Minnesota's Community Corrections Act, counties receive subsidies to provide all corrections services (other than prisons) locally. As a result, the Hennepin County Department of Community Corrections supervises probationers as well as offenders released from State prisons. 6. Phillips, Dretha M., Community Notification as Viewed by Washington's Citizens, Olympia, Washington: State Institute for Public Policy, 1998. 7. The training video can be purchased by contacting the California Peace Officer Standards and Training Board at 800-441-7678. ------------------------------- C H A P T E R 4: CHALLENGES TO PARTNERING This chapter examines problems that police-corrections partnerships have faced in planning and developing their initiatives and solutions they have devised. It focuses on strategic problems that were common across most types of partnerships rather than on tactical matters pertinent to specific collaborations. The challenges addressed are as follows: --Planning partnerships. --Building and maintaining support. --Dealing with limited resources. --Overcoming mistrust, misinformation, and stereotypes. --Removing barriers to information sharing. PLANNING PARTNERSHIPS The first agencies developing each type of partnership had no programs to serve as models. Further, although later agencies may replicate the general pattern of a prior program, many components will still need to be tailored to fit their local jurisdictions, laws, customs, and configuration of agencies. Hence, partners need to be creative, flexible, and adaptable. Agencies can foster creativity by hiring and encouraging staff who propose new ideas and who tend to question existing practices. Most importantly, agencies should not quash innovation by punishing staff who try new ideas and fail. Law enforcement agencies that implement true community policing reorganize to give more decisionmaking authority to line officers. Police-corrections partnerships can similarly delegate authority to line level staff. Some features of the initial program design are bound to need improvement. As a result, many partnerships see themselves less as finished products than as works in progress. They regard initial decisions as tentative, subject to periodic review and reconsideration. In addition, partnerships that are implemented quickly have to determine which decisions are imperative at the outset and which can be deferred. Similarly, they have to decide which policies have to be written immediately and which can be drawn up later. For example, the Minneapolis Anti-Violence Initiative went from concept to operations in less than a month. During this period, officials defined the respective roles of police officers and probation officers when conducting home visits (e.g., What do police officers do when a team of police and probation officers approaches a residence? Once inside, who takes the lead?). However, they left details of other procedures to be determined in the future, such as defining their respective roles during street sweeps. BUILDING AND MAINTAINING SUPPORT Several partnerships experienced problems building or maintaining support for their initiatives among participating organizations. For example, one partnership for enhanced supervision of gang members was supported by the adult criminal courts but not the juvenile court or juvenile probation department. To build support, many partnerships have asked all stakeholders to serve on planning committees to help design the programs. As happened in New Haven, Connecticut, this body may later become an oversight committee that periodically reviews the partnership's progress and problems. Stakeholders include organizations or individuals who have a compelling interest in the program, who control resources required to make the program work, or who have the power to block the program. In several partnerships, these committees included representatives from local, State, and Federal criminal justice agencies. In some communities near State borders, the stakeholders may include agencies from neighboring States. For example, the Clark County (Washington) Anti-Gang Unit requires support from law enforcement agencies in the metropolitan Portland, Oregon, area. In programs that focus on a particular community or neighborhood, like Operation Revitalization, planning committees also may include residents and representatives of neighborhood organizations. To the extent that residents and neighborhoods have a voice, programs are likely to focus on community, as well as agency, problems. Once all stakeholders have assembled, it is important for them to identify and agree on the common goal or goals of the partnering agencies. The principal common goal in many police-corrections partnerships is public protection. It is also important to recognize and accept the extent to which goals may vary among partners. For example, the San Francisco Police Department's goal in participating in the Fugitive Recovery Enforcement Team was to reduce new crimes by parole absconders, while the goal of the Parole and Community Services Division was to locate absconders and return them to supervision. These goals are not incompatible; they simply reflect the different perspectives of each partner. If officials develop measurable goals--ones that can be stated in numerical terms--they are more likely to agree, in the future, on whether the goal has been met. For example, they should avoid vague goals like "reduce crime in City Y" and develop measurable goals like "reduce violent crimes involving handguns by 15 percent in X neighborhood of City Y" instead. Measurable goals also lead to agreement on the data elements that need to be collected to monitor future performance. Each agency in the partnership must benefit from the association. Benefits are the "glue" that holds a partnership together. Benefits may be similar for all involved agencies. For example, sharing information about parolees in a neighborhood may help both police and parole officers do better jobs of surveillance and, as a result, deter parolees from violating the conditions of their supervision or from committing new crimes. In Washington State, local police officers involved in Smart Partners home visits gain much more detailed information about the histories and current living situations of serious offenders paroled to their communities as a result of conducting residence checks. Police officers share information they obtain in these home visits with DOC community corrections officers, which allows the corrections officers to make better and more informed decisions about managing these offenders. For example, if police officers tell a parole officer that, during a late night field interview with a paroled sex offender on his caseload, they observed a "rape kit"--a plastic bag containing a roll of duct tape and several short lengths of cord--on the back seat of his car, the parole officer probably would quickly bring the parolee in for counseling and substantially increase surveillance of the offender. Likewise, information sharing may help agencies do a better job of apprehending absconders. Police officers may have better information about an absconder's associates, and parole officers may have better information on the absconder's likely new residence. Sometimes benefits emerge once the partnership is under way that were not expected in early planning. For example, Knoxville Police Chief Phil Keith reported that anticipated barriers to information sharing dissolved once the partners discovered the barriers were created by their bureaucracies, not by existing laws. As a result, the partners were able to engage in a much quicker and fuller exchange of information than they had expected. Partnerships can improve safety for both police and probation or parole officers. Probation or parole officers may need police protection when making home visits in high-crime areas. Police may lack critical information about a particular offender's prior history or propensity for violence that probation officers can provide. The first night Boston police conducted joint patrols with probation officers, they were called to the scene of a shooting. The police officer later recounted his amazement that the probation officer knew almost everyone who was at the scene of the shooting. When partnering, police can provide enhanced security during community operations and home visits, and police and probation/parole officers can share information about suspects, subjects, and communities. Benefits may also be different for partnering agencies. For police agencies, having access to information on parolees living in a neighborhood may help investigators solve new crimes. Parole officers are safer when police officers accompany them on home visits. Computerizing field interview cards in Washington State will help police solve crimes, but sharing that information with DOC community corrections officers will let them detect violations of an offender's release conditions. Ensuring support within partnering agencies may require long-term attention. As of 1997, prosecutors in New Haven, Connecticut nominally supported the enhanced supervision partnership but refused to conduct "vertical prosecution" of revoked probation violators (that is, having one prosecutor handle all steps of the revocation process). Police and correctional officials argued that the existing practice of using any available prosecutor made outcomes inconsistent, weakening the enhanced supervision project's credibility with offenders. Building support is a never-ending process, since all the partnering agencies are constantly changing. Key actors may die, retire, or move on to other assignments. In Cincinnati, Ohio, officials noted that support declined when agency heads began sending subordinates to meetings and when the partnership expanded its scope beyond the initial neighborhood. DEALING WITH LIMITED RESOURCES Partnership participants reported that a lack of resources affected how several partnerships developed. In some cases, resource limits created the problem that partnerships were formed to correct. For example, Smart Partners was started because line officials realized that the State of Washington could not, at this time, afford to revamp its entire correctional information system. In other cases, resource limits influenced the type of solutions partners developed or caused them to scale down the scope of their proposed initiatives. Finally, in at least two cases, agencies called on political support from their partners to obtain new funding. Because enhanced supervision programs are staff intensive, they cost more per supervised offender than regular supervision. Compounding this resource problem, some of the partnering agencies had suffered recent budget cuts, which impaired their ability to function. For example, in 1996, the Connecticut Legislature cut 50 probation officers from the Adult Probation Department. The director of the department nonetheless agreed to assign four adult probation officers to work with Project One Voice in New Haven. Later he agreed to assign more probation officers to make Project One Voice citywide, but only if some of the lost positions were restored. He had two concerns. First, the prior cuts had sharply increased the average caseload for remaining probation officers. Second, other Connecticut cities were becoming interested in Project One Voice and probably would be making similar requests in the near future. This standoff had not been resolved as of early 1998. In California, funding for the Parole and Community Services Division is tied to the number of parolees on active supervision. However, the funding formula considers absconders on "nonactive" status and, therefore, provides no funding for them. As a result, if the division wanted to make a concerted effort to apprehend absconders through its Parolee-At-Large Apprehension Teams, funds to support the effort would have to be diverted from the supervision of parolees on its active caseload. Instead, consortium members lobbied successfully for an appropriation bill to add new parole agents for the teams. In other cases, however, recognition of resource constraints has motivated partnering agencies to seek creative ways to make their partnerships successful. Police officers and correctional staff who started the Smart Partners program realized that any innovations they proposed would have to work without new funding and, therefore, concentrated on simple and inexpensive ways--faxes and mail rather than new or improved computer systems--to share pertinent information. The same constraint prompted the Parole and Law Enforcement Consortium members in California to devise Parole-L.E.A.D.S., which allows police to share parole data by linking agencies in a secure Internet connection. OVERCOMING MISTRUST, MISINFORMATION, AND STEREOTYPES Officials in almost all partnerships reported that at the outset they had to overcome mistrust, misinformation, and stereotypes before they could begin setting up a partnership. Many police officers considered parole officers "social workers" who excuse parolees when they commit new crimes. Many parole officers thought that police officers harass parolees and hamper their adjustment. In Washington State, officials implementing the Sex Offender Notification and Registration law faced mistrust on a grand scale--within a few weeks, Washington DOC had to establish working relationships with hundreds of law enforcement agencies in all parts of the State. In some jurisdictions, mistrust progressed to hostility. In one instance, police officers told of a past incident in which a parole officer allegedly tipped off a parolee about an impending police raid. Whether the event really occurred or not, belief in its authenticity caused intense mistrust between police and parole officers in the jurisdiction. Tension between police officers and correctional staff also resulted from lack of information--or from misinformation. A parole procedure that might seem nonsensical to an uninformed observer might make sense to someone who understands its rationale. For example, to outside observers the practice of not tracking down absconders might be hard to defend unless they understand (as was the case in California) that operation funding is cut when offenders abscond and that diverting shrinking resources to capture them would require reducing or eliminating supervision of other active parole cases. Partnerships relied on education and communication to overcome mistrust. California's Parole and Law Enforcement Consortium set aside a substantial part of its daylong quarterly meetings for educational presentations by staff from different agencies. In other partnerships, police and probation officers met face to face, explained their jobs to one another, described the procedures they followed, and talked candidly about complaints each had about the other. Other partnerships used ride-alongs so that staff from partnering agencies could observe each other at work. These efforts were often difficult and time consuming, but staff at several partnerships emphasized that police and probation and parole officers emerged from the process with a sense of mutual respect, and even admiration, for one another. A police officer said about a probation agent with whom he conducted joint home visits, "I'd never have the courage to walk into situations unarmed like he does." REMOVING BARRIERS TO INFORMATION SHARING Almost all the agencies involved in police-corrections partnerships had previously experienced barriers to exchanging information between agencies and among staff. For example, because police departments' information about gang activity and drug sales often comes from intelligence operations, informants and undercover officers could be in danger if this intelligence information fell into the wrong hands. Indeed, partnerships between police and correctional agencies are likely to come into existence precisely because staff in these agencies have resisted information sharing in the past. The first step in breaking down barriers to information sharing is to identify the exact requirements of existing confidentiality laws. Officials in both the Washington State DOC and the Knoxville Police Department reported that their staff had assumed that confidentiality laws were broad in scope when, in fact, the real barriers to information sharing were intraagency procedures. A statutory review may also identify laws that need to be modified for the partnership to function as intended. Partnering agencies also need to focus on data quality issues. There may be no benefit (and there may even be harm) in sharing information that is outdated or unreliable. Databases may need constant monitoring for quality, especially if the subject of the data (e.g., a registry of local gang members) undergoes continual change. The second step is to review the policies and procedures within the partnering agencies that govern data entry, data processing, and access to and use of records. (See "Partnerships Must Solve Scores of Operational Problems.") All partners should determine where these policies may be hampering information sharing and make any needed modifications. If partners understand where their information flow procedures may be vulnerable, they can take steps to prevent a breakdown. For example, information sharing in Washington's Smart Partners program could happen only if police crime analysts copied field interview cards for active DOC cases and faxed them to regional DOC supervisors. If the analysts failed to perform these tasks, the information flow stopped. Copying and faxing the cards resulted in substantial benefits to the police department and the correctional agency, but, to the crime analysts, it seemed like additional work. To prevent the analysts from balking, they needed to be made to understand that the tasks conferred significant benefits on both agencies. As suggested in the vignette above, the third step is to ensure that staff understand the benefits that improved information exchange will bring. This educational effort should extend to all staff whose current job performance will be affected by changes in information flow. ------------------------------- Partnerships Must Solve Scores of Operational Problems Every partnership will have to solve scores of operational or tactical problems. Sometimes the experiences of other partnerships will be helpful, but often solutions that worked in another partnership must be remodeled to work in a new one because local laws or practices are different. In New Haven, Connecticut, officials prepare books for police officers that depict gang members targeted for intensified surveillance by Project One Voice, but if an offender had no prior record, it could take weeks to get a current mugshot to include in the book. Officials worked out a procedure that eliminates the delay. The offender is photographed with a Polaroid camera at arraignment, the photograph is scanned into the New Haven Police Department mugshot database, and the photo is then printed onto the sheet for the book. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Vancouver, Washington, enhanced supervision partnerships faced problems with offenders moving to an adjoining city or a neighboring State to elude intensified surveillance. The Minnesota Anti-Violence Initiative started as a partnership between county probation and city police but quickly expanded to include the county sheriff so that joint police-corrections operations could occur outside the city of Minneapolis. In Vancouver, members of the Clark County Anti-Gang Unit worked out a cross-deputization arrangement with law enforcement agencies in Multnomah County, Oregon, so they could pursue fleeing Washington offenders into Oregon or could enter Oregon and arrest persons wanted on Washington warrants. ------------------------------- C H A P T E R 5: THE FUTURE OF POLICE-CORRECTIONS PARTNERSHIPS As their number grows, it will become increasingly important to study the different types of police-corrections partnerships to find out what distinguishes successful efforts from unsuccessful efforts and to use that knowledge to refine future development and operations. Policymakers will face the challenge of guiding the development of partnerships in a manner that effectively achieves desired outcomes without stultifying them with traditional bureaucracy. In addition, the changing roles of police and corrections may prompt courts to reexamine case law governing important practices like search and seizure. LEGAL ISSUES Police-corrections partnerships raise important legal issues that cannot be addressed fully in this brief report. However, the discussion below highlights some of these issues. Some legal issues have operational and, possibly, fiscal implications. For example, there may be new liability issues when probation or parole officers perform joint patrols with police, or when police accompany probation or parole officers on home visits. Changes may be needed in confidentiality laws or regulations for partnering agencies to share information about citizens or offenders without risking a lawsuit. Partnerships also raise more substantial legal questions. One particularly important issue deals with the correctional agencies' authority to search probationers and parolees and the scope of the exclusionary rule if they find evidence of wrongdoing. In Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole v. Scott, DN 97-581 (June 22, 1998), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that evidence obtained in warrantless searches by parole officers could be considered in a revocation hearing, even though this evidence would not be admissible in a new criminal trial. Writing for the 5 to 4 majority, Justice Clarence Thomas emphasized that the exclusionary rule is a judicially crafted instrument designed to deter illegal searches, but because the exclusionary rule imposes a high cost on the factfinding process, it applies only when its benefit outweighs this cost. Justice Thomas noted that the courts have been reluctant to expand the exclusionary rule to proceedings other than criminal trials.[1] He noted that parole hearings are flexible administrative proceedings conducted by nonjudicial officials (usually hearing examiners) in which traditional rules of evidence do not apply. Because it frequently requires lengthy litigation to determine if a particular search was permissible, Justice Thomas noted that the application of the exclusionary rule would be inconsistent with the nonadversarial administrative proceedings common in State parole systems. Finally, Justice Thomas drew a key distinction between the purposes of search by police and those by parole officers, observing that police search in order to obtain evidence that can be used to convict offenders of crimes while parole officers search to obtain evidence bearing on compliance with parole conditions. He said: Parole agents, in contrast to police officers, are not engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime; instead, their primary concern is whether their parolees should remain free on parole. Thus, their relationship with parolees is more supervisory than adversarial. It would be unfair to assume that the parole officer bears hostility against the parolee that destroys his neutrality; realistically, the failure of the parolee is a failure for his supervising officer. In a prior case, a lower court upheld warrantless searches on the ground that probation and parole officers do not target offenders (United States v. James, 893 F. Supp. 649 (U.S.D. Tex., July 1995). As a result of this body of case law, probation and parole officers have greater latitude to conduct searches of persons under their supervision and the probationers' or parolees' immediate surroundings than police have with respect to the general public.[2] Probation and parole agencies have grown to rely heavily on warrantless searches. In most States,[3] probation and parole officers' broad warrantless search powers may be further justified because their agencies require offenders to agree to submit to warrantless searches as a standard condition of supervision. Some police-corrections partnerships operate in ways that could call these distinctions between police and corrections into question. For example, in enhanced supervision projects, partnering agencies often target groups of offenders (such as gang members believed to be criminally active, violent, or trafficking in drugs) for more rigorous surveillance, which increases the odds that violations of their conditions of supervision will be observed. Warrantless searches by probation or parole officers may turn up evidence of wrongdoing that prompt accompanying police partners to obtain a search warrant to conduct an expanded search, which may turn up substantial evidence of a crime. If targeted offenders are believed to be dangerous or criminally active, the partners' strategy may be to use any violation as grounds to revoke offenders' supervised release and to imprison them as quickly as possible. While this strategy may be reasonable from a public protection viewpoint, it may also transform probation or parole from a neutral supervisory relationship into an adversarial relationship. Indeed, dissenting in Scott, Justice David Souter criticized the majority for characterizing the parole officer-parolee relationship as nonadversarial. He noted that the facts in Scott showed that the search was performed only after the parole officer had arrested Scott and concluded that the revocation hearing was the only forum in which illegally seized evidence would ever be offered. For the present, Scott provides a narrow foundation supporting warrantless searches by probation and parole officers. (Undoubtedly, cases involving warrantless searches by probation or parole officers conducting joint operations with police will arise and work their way through the courts.) A lower court has ruled that probation and parole officers cannot act as "stalking horses" for police--that is, collaborate to help police evade the Fourth Amendment's warrant and probable cause requirements.[4] Courts may yet restrict warrantless searches in joint police-correctional operations still further. RESEARCH ISSUES There is scant empirical evidence on how well police-corrections partnerships work. As a result, law enforcement and corrections policymakers and administrators should support process and outcome evaluations of existing partnerships. Evaluations are needed for two reasons. First, administrators of partnerships need to monitor how their programs are operating so they can make midcourse adjustments to achieve their goals more effectively. Second, policymakers need to know what impact partnerships have on broad criminal justice goals and on the operations of other criminal justice agencies. Enhanced supervision programs and fugitive units are the most common types of police-corrections partnerships. The following sections outline some of the questions researchers and program administrators should ask in evaluating these types of partnerships and suggest approaches to finding out the answers. WHAT ARE THE PARTNERSHIP'S GOALS? Identify what the partnership intends to achieve. In an enhanced supervision program, crime reduction is likely to be an explicit goal. For example, in Washington State the Anti-Gang Unit wants to reduce the rate of violent crimes committed by gang-involved offenders in Clark County. The explicit goal of the PAL project, a fugitive unit in California, is to reduce the number of new crimes committed by high-risk parole absconders. To frame such a goal, of course, officials must be able to measure the baseline or beginning crime rates attributed to the target population. Identify implicit goals, which partners may express privately but not formally. Different partners may have different implicit goals. For example, in Boston's Operation Night Light, police officers wanted to incarcerate the leaders of two or three especially violent gangs. In New Haven's Project One Voice, probation officers wanted to increase the proportion of gang-involved offenders who successfully completed their terms and conditions of supervision. HOW WILL THE GOALS BE ACHIEVED? Identify the means by which members of the partnership expect to achieve each goal. For example, in the case of enhanced supervision partnerships, crime reduction goals might be achieved by: --Incapacitation. --Deterrence. --Rehabilitation. Partners might use two tactics to achieve incapacitation. First, they might impose intensive surveillance on offenders who are the leaders of the most active criminal gangs and either prosecute vigorously all new crimes or respond sternly to all violations of probation or parole. Second, they might require gang members who are on probation or parole to observe nightly curfews and avoid associating with other gang members. The stern treatment of targeted gang leaders might serve to deter other gang members (or even nongang members) from committing new crimes. Partners also might deter new crimes by invoking swift and certain (but not necessarily severe) sanctions for gang members who commit minor, noncriminal probation or parole violations. Several probation officials contended that increasing the certainty of detection (without increasing the severity of responses to violations) increased offenders' adherence to their conditions of supervision. This contention is consistent with deterrence theory, which proposes three separate means by which sanctions deter: certainty, swiftness, and severity.[5] Finally, partners might expand drug treatment programs in the community and use probation officers' supervisory authority to motivate probationers to attend them. In a fugitive unit, the partners might pursue a selective incapacitation strategy. That is, they might use a risk-based classification instrument to separate the absconder population into low-, medium-, and high-risk groups and then allocate the bulk of their resources to locating and apprehending the high-risk absconders as quickly as possible. WHAT CONDITIONS MUST BE MET TO ACHIEVE THE INTENDED GOALS? Identify conditions that must be met for each means to work. For example, to incapacitate leaders of criminally active gangs who are arrested for new crimes, prosecutors need to file the most serious appropriate charges; reject plea bargains to lesser charges; and, upon conviction, advocate imposition of severe sentences. Similarly, within the discretionary limits available to them, judges need to consider convicted defendants' gang leadership status as an aggravating factor and, reflecting this circumstance, impose more severe sentences. In the example of a fugitive unit, the risk-based classification instrument needs to clearly discriminate among low-, medium-, and high-risk offenders. Such an instrument might produce groups whose average failure (e.g., technical violations or arrests for new crimes) rates are: --Low-risk group = 10 percent. --Medium-risk group = 30 percent. --High-risk group = 60 percent. An instrument that discriminates poorly might produce groups whose average failure rates are: --Low-risk group = 25 percent. --Medium-risk group = 30 percent. --High-risk group = 35 percent. In addition, the unit's targeting procedures should be consistent with a risk-based approach--that is, informal practices should not undercut the categorization produced by a valid risk-based classification approach, although "overrides" based on specified criteria may be encouraged. For both enhanced supervision programs and fugitive units, crime reduction strategies are based on the assumption that minor (e.g., noncriminal or technical) violations of conditions of supervision are precursors to or valid predictors of new crimes. It would be valuable for researchers to test that assumption, especially in light of prior studies of intensive supervision programs.[6] Research has shown that intensive supervision increased the rate of technical violations by increasing the number of conditions offenders had to obey and by observing offenders more frequently. When intensive supervision was used for low-risk offenders, the number of revocations for technical violations increased sharply, but there was no significant reduction in the rate of new crimes these offenders committed. In short, the technical violation rate varied with the number of conditions and rigor of their enforcement, but the violation rate was not related to probability of committing new crimes. Analyze data to seek variables associated with new crimes. It may be, for example, that technical violations are associated with new crimes for some, but not all, categories of offenders. For example, staff of some partnerships expressed the belief that predatory sex offenders undergo a deviancy cycle in which a period of destabilization and minor slips (which would be indicated by technical violations) typically precedes the commission of new crimes. DID THE PARTNERSHIP ACHIEVE ITS GOALS? Define each goal in measurable and realistic terms. Measurable goals need to be quantified--that is, stated in numerical terms. Ambiguity about whether goals have been met is less likely if they are measurable. Realistic goals are ones that the partnership has a reasonable chance to achieve. For example, it would be unrealistic for Project One Voice to establish a goal to reduce violent crime in the city of New Haven, but it would be realistic to set a goal to reduce violent crime in the two New Haven neighborhoods in which it operates. Collect data elements needed to measure each goal. The elements of data required to measure each goal need to be specified, and ways to routinely collect those data need to be found. If information that police or probation officers have to record in any event also supports research needs, data collection becomes a normal part of routine project activities, thereby reducing duplication of effort and costs. WAS THE PARTNERSHIP IMPLEMENTED AS INTENDED? Examine and document changes made to the original program design. Such changes could alter--for better or worse--some of the conditions needed for the partnership's initiatives to work. Did some of the stakeholders withdraw their support during implementation or fail to provide resources or services as envisioned? Did a participant in the partnership implement a new program that doubled the number of summer jobs available for at-risk youth in the target neighborhood? Did changes during implementation affect: --How offenders were selected? --The types of offenders selected? --The level of services actually delivered or tasks performed? --The expected products of the interventions? Examine the services or functions the partnership actually delivered. Partnerships need to document what they do. For example, if an enhanced supervision partnership includes home visits, records might be kept on the following: --The number of home visits conducted and the significant characteristics of the home visits, such as: o Time, date, and address. o Type of dwelling. o Other persons present (including number and relation to probationer). --The number of probationers who were home when the visit was conducted. --The number of home visits in which: o The probationer was in full compliance with conditions. o The probationer violated one or more conditions (including the number of each type of violation observed). o There was a revocation of supervision and confinement (including the length of each confinement). o There was an incident threatening someone's personal safety. DID FACTORS BESIDES THE PARTNERSHIP AFFECT THE OUTCOMES? Try to determine the extent to which other factors accounted for observed changes. For example, in enhanced supervision programs (particularly those that focus on a particular neighborhood), crime may be displaced from one area to another. Officials in New Haven, Connecticut; Clark County, Washington; and Minneapolis, Minnesota, acknowledged that their programs may have displaced crime to other areas. Indeed, neighborhoods may be targeted by an enhanced supervision program because they were the probable recipients of crime that was displaced from another neighborhood. Other crime prevention or treatment initiatives also may have contributed to any observed changes in crime rates. New Haven, for example, had a vigorous program to rid neighborhoods of abandoned houses in the same neighborhoods as Project One Voice. Demographic or economic changes also can affect crime rates. Was there a change in immigration patterns into a neighborhood during the time the partnership operated? Was there a change in the unemployment rate in the neighborhood during the initiative? WHAT EFFECTS DID THE PARTNERSHIP HAVE ON THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM? Identify ways the partnership affected costs or workloads in other criminal justice agencies. For example, did the prosecutor and courts have to process more probation revocations? Did local jails or State prisons have to house more arrestees or more sentenced offenders? What were the costs of these changes? Did changes in criminal justice workload and cost affect support for the partnership? DID THE PARTNERSHIP MAKE MIDCOURSE CORRECTIONS? Provide regular, relevant, and constructive feedback. At frequent predetermined intervals, researchers should give administrators feedback on how the partnerships are operating. Such information is most useful if it is presented in an easy-to-understand format and focuses on important features of the partnership. Researchers should present a synopsis of findings that calls attention to areas where the partnership is not performing as expected and, if possible, describes possible causes and solutions. For example, if a partnership had a goal of placing 200 drug-involved youths in drug treatment but only 50 were placed, researchers need to try to provide information to help identify why placements fell short. WHAT KINDS OF PARTNERSHIPS WORK BEST? Identify characteristics that distinguished successful partnerships from unsuccessful ones. For example, are enhanced supervision programs more likely to succeed when they are planned by: --Two partnering agencies acting alone? --A committee representing major criminal justice organizations? --A committee representing major criminal justice organizations and community groups? Are crime reduction goals more likely to be achieved by a partnership that relies mainly on incapacitation or on a mix of incapacitation, deterrence, and rehabilitation? What strategies work best for different kinds of offenders? GUIDING THE FUTURE DEVELOPMENT OF POLICE-CORRECTIONS PARTNERSHIPS Police-corrections partnerships have been more concerned with specific day-to-day problems and pragmatic solutions than with broad questions about the policy implications of their choices. The partnerships' focus on solving specific problems in discrete geographic areas and with rapid startup may account for this. For example, few partnerships have considered their effects on the following: --Rates of revocation and return to confinement. --Prison capacity required to confine violators. --Cost of building and providing that capacity. --Overall crime patterns within a city. --Allocation of police resources among precincts. --Implications of expanding police-corrections partnerships to more neighborhoods within a large city. It is important for police and correctional leaders to begin addressing these kinds of issues because these partnerships can have a potentially major impact on State and local criminal justice workloads and resource requirements. Smart Partners in Washington State is a good example. Although it started in just 2 communities, more than 50 cities and counties now participate in this program in which police officers conduct unannounced home visits to offenders released from prison on intensive supervision. However, Smart Partners does not prescribe responses to detected violations. As a result, responses vary widely from city to city. Officials in one city said a successful outcome meant the offender completed supervision without committing a new crime or a serious violation of his or her conditions of supervision. In this city, the rate of revocation reportedly had not changed after Smart Partners went into effect. In another city, officials noted that since the program went into effect their revocation rate had jumped to 100 percent--all their intensively supervised offenders had been revoked and reimprisoned. For them, a successful outcome was a reincarcerated offender. The effects of such variations need to be known. For example, substantial increases in overall revocation and reimprisonment rates might have major implications for the agency operating State prisons. State correctional officials would probably want to project the likely impact of any changes in practice and make informed, high-level decisions based on the costs and benefits of alternative policies. If policymakers decide they cannot afford major increases in revocations, they may want to establish policies that promote responses other than imprisonment for noncriminal violations. Establishing those priorities requires agency leaders to have a vision of what partnerships should do, which is informed by an understanding of the following: --The operation of existing partnerships in other States and localities. --The goals of their own criminal justice system and agencies. --Pertinent research findings (so they can build on what works and avoid repeating past mistakes). In short, effective use of partnerships will require policymakers to create a model that defines what their own particular partnership ought to look like, what broad goals it should seek, and how it ought to operate. It also requires generating information needed to implement midcourse improvements and to assess overall effectiveness at regular intervals. NOTES 1. The exclusionary rule does not apply to grand juries (United States v. Calandra, 414 U.S. 338 (1974)), civil tax trials (United States v. Janis, 428 U.S. 448 (1976)), or deportation hearings (United States v. Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U.S. 1032 (1984)). 2. Probation and parole officers do not have unlimited power to search. They cannot search based on mere speculation, but must have a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing by the subject. 3. In New Mexico, for example, a lower Federal court ruled that the State constitution prohibits warrantless searches by probation officers of persons under their supervision. State v. Marquart, 945 P.2d 1097 (N.M. App. Sept. 1997). 4. United States v. McCarthy, 82 F. 3d 943, U.S. 10th Cir., April, 1997. 5. Nagin, Daniel, "General Deterrence: A Review of Empirical Evidence," in Deterrence and Incapacitation, ed. Alfred Blumstein, Jacqueline Cohen, and Daniel Nagin, Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1978: 95- 139. 6. Petersilia, Joan and Turner, Susan, "Intensive Probation and Parole," in Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, vol. 17, ed. Michael Tonry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993: 281-335. ------------------------------- SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY American Parole and Probation Association. Restoring Hope Through Community Partnerships: A Handbook for Community Corrections. Lexington, KY: American Parole and Probation Association, 1996. Anderson, David C. In New York City, A Community Court and a New Legal Culture (Program Focus). Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, 1996, NCJ 158613. Association of State Correctional Administrators. "ASCA Ties with Law Enforcement (Police) Agencies Survey." Unpublished paper provided by the Association of State Correctional Administrators, South Salem, NY: 1997. Byrne, James M. and Kelly, Linda. Restructuring Probation as an Intermediate Sanction: An Evaluation of the Massachusetts Intensive Probation Supervision Program. Final report to the National Institute of Justice. Lowell, MA: University of Massachusetts, Lowell, 1989. California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST). Parole and Local Law Enforcement: A Telecourse for California Law Enforcement (Video). Sacramento, CA: California Commission on POST, 1997. California Department of Corrections. "Parolee-At-Large Apprehension Program (Fugitive Apprehension Team)--Fact Sheet." Unpublished paper provided by Parole and Community Services Division, Sacramento, CA: October 1998. California Department of Corrections, Parole and Community Services Division. "Parolee-At-Large Apprehension Program--Overview of Program Outputs and Impacts." Unpublished paper provided by Law Enforcement Consortium, Sacramento, CA: October 30, 1997. California Department of Corrections, Parole and Community Services Division. "Parolee-At-Large Policies." Unpublished paper provided by Parolee-At-Large Apprehension Program, Sacramento, CA: 1998. California Department of Justice. "Serious Habitual Offender Program-- Program Overview." Unpublished paper provided by Serious Habitual Offender Program, Sacramento, CA: July 1993. Center for Substance Abuse Treatment. Maricopa County Adult Probation, Pretrial Services, and Sheriff's Office and TASC, The Women's Network Brochure--Phoenix AZ. Rockville, MD: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, n.d. Community Policing Consortium. Information Access Guide: An Ongoing Compilation of Community Policing Resources. Washington, D.C.: Community Policing Consortium, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice, 1997. Corbett, Ronald P. "Probation Blue: The Promise (and Perils) of Probation-Police Partnerships." Correctional Management Quarterly (Spring 1998):31-39. Corbett, Ronald P., Fitzgerald, Bernard L., and Jordan, James, "Boston's Operation Night Light: An Emerging Model for Police-Probation Partnerships." In Community Corrections: Probation, Parole and Intermediate Sanctions, ed. Joan Petersilia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 180-186. Goldstein, Herman. "Improving Policing: A Problem-Oriented Approach." Crime and Delinquency 25 (1979): 236-258. Hennepin County Department of Adult Corrections. Fugitive Apprehension Project--First Report. Minneapolis, MN: Adult Field Services Division, Hennepin County Community Corrections, 1984. Leaf, Robin, Lurigio, Arthur, and Martin, Nancy. "Chicago's Project Safeway: Strengthening Probation's Links With the Community." In Community Corrections: Probation, Parole and Intermediate Sanctions, ed. Joan Petersilia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Malcan, Dee. "Portsmouth Probation, Parole and Law Enforcement Combining Resources to Prevent Crime." Perspectives (Fall 1997):26-27. McDonald, Douglas C. and Teitelbaum, Michele. Managing Mentally Ill Offenders in the Community: Milwaukee's Community Support Program (Program Focus). Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, 1994, NCJ 145330. Minetti, Pat G. and Malcan, Dee. "Hampton Police Collaborate with Probation and Parole for Safer Communities." Perspectives (Fall 1997):20-22. Moore, Mark H. "Problem-Solving and Community Policing." In Modern Policing, ed. M. Tonry and N. Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Morgan, Terry and Marrs, Stephen D. "Redmond, Washington's SMART Partnership for Police and Community Corrections." In Community Corrections: Probation, Parole and Intermediate Sanctions, ed. Joan Petersilia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Nagin, Daniel. "General Deterrence: A Review of Empirical Evidence." In Deterrence and Incapacitation, ed. Alfred Blumstein, Jacqueline Cohen, and Daniel Nagin. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1978. Nevers, Dan. "Neighborhood Probation: Adapting a 'Beat Cop' Concept to Community Supervision." In Community Corrections: Probation, Parole and Intermediate Sanctions, ed. Joan Petersilia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Parent, Dale G. "Structuring Policies to Address Sanctions for Absconders and Violators." In Reclaiming Offender Accountability: Intermediate Sanctions for Probation and Parole Violators, ed. Edward E. Rhine. Laurel, MD: American Correctional Association, 1992. Parent, Dale G., Wentworth, Daniel, Ney, Becki, and Burke, Peggy. Responding to Probation and Parole Violations (Issues and Practices). Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice, 1994, NCJ 149473. Petersilia, Joan. "A Crime Control Rationale for Reinvesting in Community Corrections." In Community Corrections: Probation, Parole and Intermediate Sanctions, ed. Joan Petersilia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Petersilia, Joan and Turner, Susan. Intensive Probation Supervision for High-Risk Offenders: Findings from Three California Experiments. Santa Monica, CA: The Rand Corporation, 1990. Petersilia, Joan and Turner, Susan. "Intensive Probation and Parole." In Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, vol. 17, ed. Michael Tonry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Petersilia, Joan and Turner, Susan. "Prison Versus Probation in California: Implications for Crime and Offender Recidivism." In Community Corrections: Probation, Parole and Intermediate Sanctions, ed. Joan Petersilia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Phillips, Dretha M. Community Notification as Viewed by Washington's Citizens. Olympia, WA: Washington State Institute for Public Policy, 1998. Phoenix Criminal Justice Treatment Network Project. "Technical Assistance Report: Cross Discipline Team Building Training for Alpha Jail Program." Unpublished paper provided by Johnson, Bassin, and Shaw, Inc. Silver Spring, MD: August 1997. Pierini, Leo. "Fugitive Recovery Enforcement Team (F.R.E.T.) Program-- Update and Report." Unpublished paper provided by San Francisco Field Units of the State Parole Division (Unit #1 and Unit #3). San Francisco, CA, June 26, 1995. State of California Office of the Attorney General. "Serious Habitual Offender Program (SHOP) Pilot Project--Summary Report." Unpublished paper provided by the California Department of Justice, Sacramento, CA: December 4, 1994. Tatosian, Ed. "CCAP: A Sacramento Law Enforcement Partnership." Unpublished paper provided by the Sacramento Police Department. Sacramento, CA, November 5, 1997. Vallejo Police Department and the Vallejo City Unified School District, et. al. Grant Application to the California Office of Criminal Justice Planning, Vallejo Police Department. Vallejo, CA: April 30, 1996. ------------------------------- APPENDIX: CONTACT LIST Introduction: The following persons may be contacted for more information about the specific partnerships described in this report. Arizona Program: Neighborhood Probation Contact(s): Ed Mansfield, Community Programs Supervisor Superior Court of Arizona Maricopa County Adult Probation Department 111 South 3rd Avenue, 5th Floor Phoenix, AZ 85003 Tel.: (602) 506-3680 Fax: (602) 506-3383 California Program: Fugitive Recovery Enforcement Team (F.R.E.T.) Contact(s): Merline Taira, Parole Agent State of California Department of Corrections Parole and Community Services Division One Holland Court San Francisco, CA 94103 Tel.: (415) 597-5875 Fax: (415) 597-5891 Program: Parolee-At-Large Apprehension Program Contact(s): Richard Rimmer, Parole Administrator State of California Department of Corrections Parole and Community Services Division Parolee-At-Large Apprehension Program 1515 South Street, Suite 212 N Sacramento, CA 95814 Tel.: (916) 323-0464 Fax: (916) 327-0785 Program: California Parole and Law Enforcement Consortium Contact(s): Les Johnson, Law Enforcement Liaison State of California Department of Corrections Parole and Community Services Division 1515 South Street, Room 212 N Sacramento, CA 95814 Tel.: (916) 323-3242 Fax: (916) 322-0970 Program: Serious Habitual Offender Program Contact(s): Carol Hoffman, Criminal Identification Specialist State of California Office of the Attorney General Serious Habitual Offender Program P.O. Box 903387 Sacramento, CA 94203-3870 Tel.: (916) 227-4161 Fax: (916) 227-4085 Connecticut Program: Project One Voice Contact(s): Douglas P. MacDonald, Assistant Police Chief New Haven Police Department One Union Avenue New Haven, CT 06519 Tel.: (203) 946-6266 Fax: (203) 946-7294 Minnesota Program: Fugitive Apprehension Program (FAP) Contact(s): Jack Hughes, Parole/Probation Officer Hennepin County Department of Community Corrections Adult Field Services--Fugitive Apprehension 525 Portland Avenue South, Suite 710 Minneapolis, MN 55415 Tel.: (612) 348-7549 Fax: (612) 348-8897 Program: Minneapolis Anti-Violence Initiative (MAVI) Contact(s): Jim Robertson, Program Manager Hennepin County Department of Community Corrections Adult Field Services A-302 Government Center 300 South 6th Street Minneapolis, MN 55487 Tel.: (612) 348-9215 Fax: (612) 348-8757 Washington Program: Clark County Anti-Gang Unit Contact(s): Charles E. Atkins, Sergeant Clark County Sheriff's Office 707 West 13th Street P.O. Box 410 Vancouver, WA 98666 Tel.: (360) 699-2211, ext. 4314 Program: Smart Partners Contact(s): Stephen D. Marrs, Community Corrections Officer III State of Washington Department of Corrections Office of Correctional Operations 23-148th Avenue SE. NB-69 Bellevue, WA 98007 Tel.: (425) 649-4339 Program: Sex Offender Notification and Registration Unit Contact(s): Victoria Roberts, Program Administrator for Community Protection Unit State of Washington Department of Corrections P.O. Box 41127 Olympia, WA 98502 Tel.: (360) 753-1678 Fax: (360) 586-4577 ------------------------------- About the National Institute of Justice The National Institute of Justice (NIJ), a component of the Office of Justice Programs, is the research agency of the U.S. Department of Justice. Created by the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, as amended, NIJ is authorized to support research, evaluation, and demonstration programs, development of technology, and both national and international information dissemination. Specific mandates of the Act direct NIJ to: --Sponsor special projects, and research and development programs, that will improve and strengthen the criminal justice system and reduce or prevent crime. --Conduct national demonstration projects that employ innovative or promising approaches for improving criminal justice. --Develop new technologies to fight crime and improve criminal justice. --Evaluate the effectiveness of criminal justice programs and identify programs that promise to be successful if continued or repeated. --Recommend actions that can be taken by Federal, State, and local governments as well as by private organizations to improve criminal justice. --Carry out research on criminal behavior. --Develop new methods of crime prevention and reduction of crime and delinquency. In recent years, NIJ has greatly expanded its initiatives, the result of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (the Crime Act), partnerships with other Federal agencies and private foundations, advances in technology, and a new international focus. Some examples of these new initiatives: --New research and evaluation are exploring key issues in community policing, violence against women, sentencing reforms, and specialized courts such as drug courts. --Dual-use technologies are being developed to support national defense and local law enforcement needs. --The causes, treatment, and prevention of violence against women and violence within the family are being investigated in cooperation with several agencies of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. --NIJ's links with the international community are being strengthened through membership in the United Nations network of criminological institutes; participation in developing the U.N. Criminal Justice Information Network; initiation of UNOJUST (U.N. Online Justice Clearinghouse), which electronically links the institutes to the U.N. network; and establishment of an NIJ International Center. --The NIJ-administered criminal justice information clearinghouse, the world's largest, has improved its online capability. --The Institute's Drug Use Forecasting (DUF) program has been expanded and enhanced. Renamed ADAM (Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring), the program will increase the number of drug-testing sites, and its role as a "platform" for studying drug-related crime will grow. --NIJ's new Crime Mapping Research Center will provide training in computer mapping technology, collect and archive geocoded crime data, and develop analytic software. --The Institute's program of intramural research has been expanded and enhanced. The Institute Director, who is appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, establishes the Institute's objectives, guided by the priorities of the Office of Justice Programs, the Department of Justice, and the needs of the criminal justice field. The Institute actively solicits the views of criminal justice professionals and researchers in the continuing search for answers that inform public policymaking in crime and justice.