Reasons to Question, Questions to Ask: Do Your Probation Conditions and Enforcement Strategies Promote Meaningful Accountability for Youth, Families, and System Stakeholders?
This section of the toolkit can help you assess whether your current approaches to juvenile probation conditions and enforcement effectively promote youth behavior change, youth and system accountability, and system equity. We recommend you start by watching the video. Then review the reasons and questions to assess your current policies and practices and begin to identify opportunities for improvement.
Reasons to Question. Questions to Ask.
Click through the information to individually and collectively assess your current policies and practices and begin to identify opportunities for improvement in these areas:
- Accountability for What
- Accountability How
- Accountability When
- Accountability Who
Reasons to Question
Accountability for What
- The need to hold youth accountable is frequently cited as the reason for probation conditions, and for system involvement generally, but is rarely a well-defined, research-supported concept.
- Research shows that direct restorative justice activities, such as victim mediation, can reduce reoffending and improve victim satisfaction but are still used sparingly by most locales.1
- Restorative justice that is compulsory, as expressed through conditions, and disconnected from the specific harm caused, such as unrelated community service requirements, is less effective.2
- Traditional approaches to condition setting and enforcement don’t hold youth accountable for or address the underlying causes of youth’s behavior.
Questions to Ask
Accountability for What
- What should youth under system supervision be held accountable for and why? To what extent does your approach to probation conditions effectively promote this kind of accountability and align with what research shows works to keep communities safer and improve youth outcomes?
- How, if at all, are victims and impacted communities involved in shaping probation conditions, responses, and restorative justice activities?
- To what extent is restorative justice used in your system? Is it voluntary, individualized, and proportional to the specific harm caused by youth to victims and communities?
Reasons to Question
Accountability How
- Traditional approaches to condition setting and accountability can set up not only youth for failure, but probation officers and judges by making them feel compelled to enforce conditions even if they feel those conditions are not individualized or realistically achievable.
- In many locales, the largest single driver of new probation cases is technical violations filed for youth already on probation.3
- Nationwide, approximately 16 percent of youth who are detained and 12 percent who are incarcerated in state custody end up there due to technical violations of probation conditions.4
- Probation officers sometimes feel like they need a “hammer” to hold over youth—and families—to get them to follow conditions, but research shows that incentives, family engagement, cognitive behavioral techniques, and youth development approaches are all more effective motivators.5
Questions to Ask
Accountability How
- What tools do your court and probation officers use to promote accountability for behavior change? To what extent are these tools based on research or surveillance and sanctions?
- What proportion of youth in your system who are disposed to probation, detained, and incarcerated end up there due to violations of probation conditions or court orders?
- To what extent do your current court and system responses to probation violations effectively address the underlying reasons for the violations?
Reason to Question
Accountability When
- Research shows that graduated responses are only effective at promoting accountability if administered in a timely, proportional, and fair way.6
Question to Ask
Accountability When
- How much time does it take to administer incentives and graduated sanctions in response to youth’s behavior, including probation and court responses?
Reasons to Question
Accountability Who
- Youth and families are rarely involved in shaping, guiding, and implementing the incentives and graduated responses used to hold them accountable and motivate behavior change.
- Traditional approaches to condition setting and holding youth accountable assume youth operate in a vacuum, when instead, their behavior is heavily shaped by external circumstances and actors such as their families, schools, service providers, resources, and community supports.
- Accountability is most effective when shared, but youth and families rarely have the opportunity to hold probation officers, judges, service providers, and others accountable for whether and how they effectively support them to achieve their own and system goals.
Questions to Ask
Accountability Who
- To what extent are youth and families involved in how probation conditions are enforced, and more generally, in shaping and implementing case plans, supervision, and services?
- Does your current condition-setting and enforcement process help sustainably strengthen families’ ability to hold youth accountable or supplant parental ownership and authority?
- What opportunities exist or should be created for mutual accountability, such as through a shared supervision or service agreement among all case parties that details each entity’s responsibilities and is reviewed through regular hearings and/or family-team meetings?
Endnotes
1 J. Pennel, C. Shapiro, and W. Spigner, Safety, Fairness, Stability: Repositioning Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare to Engage Families and Communities (Washington, DC: Center for Juvenile Justice Georgetown University, 2011); Lawrence W. Sherman and Heather Strang, Restorative Justice: The Evidence (London: The Smith Institute, 2007).
2 National Research Council, Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2013), https://doi.org/10.17226/14685.
3 These data are not formally captured or reported in the vast majority of locales. However, the CSG Justice Center has partnered with numerous states and counties to analyze their juvenile justice data, and in many of these jurisdictions, probation violations are the largest single driver of new probation cases.
4 Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Easy Access to the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement (Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2019), https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/ezacjrp/.
5 Richard J. Bonnie et al., eds., Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach (Washington DC: National Academies Press, 2013).
6 David S. Lee and Justin McCrary, Crime, Punishment, and Myopia (Massachusetts: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2005) 1–58; William Meyer, Ten Science-Based Principles of Changing Behavior Through the Use of Reinforcement and Punishment (Washington, DC: National Drug Court Institute, 2006).
You just explored Reasons to Question, Questions to Ask—Accountability. Be sure to engage with the other modules. Next is Reasons to Question, Questions to Ask—Equity.
Right now, you are exploring Reasons to Question, Questions to Ask—Accountability. Be sure to watch the video, review the information, and engage with the other modules. Next is Equity.