Reasons to Question, Questions to Ask: Are Your Probation Conditions and Enforcement Strategies Effective Tools for Promoting Community Safety and Positive Youth Behavior Change?
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:
- Developmental Science
- Risk, Need, Responsivity (RNR)
- Procedural Justice and Youth/Family Partnership
- Practicalities
Reasons to Question
Developmental Science
- Adolescents are impulsive, risk taking, and don’t consider long-term consequences.1
- Adolescents are motivated by incentives, not rules, especially if consequences for breaking the rules are not timely (due to court or administrative processes), direct, or proportional.2
- Probation conditions, such as daily school attendance, are static and absolute; adolescents are inconsistent, and their behavior improvements are uneven.
Questions to Ask
Developmental Science
- How does your approach to condition setting account for adolescent development?
- In your experience, when youth are struggling to follow the rules, what approaches have worked to help them understand how to meet these expectations? Does this include setting stricter and/or more rules?
- Are your conditions constructed to promote youth’s success or to set them up for failure?
Reasons to Question
Risk, Need, Responsivity (RNR)
- Effective recidivism reduction requires identifying and addressing the underlying causes of individual youth’s behavior; conditions are typically standardized and generic.3
- Research has shown that supervision, by itself, has minimal, if any, impact on recidivism; increased monitoring typically reveals more misbehavior than it prevents or mitigates.4
- Spending time and resources on condition monitoring means that probation officers, judges, and service providers spend less time and fewer resources on addressing youth’s risks and needs.
Questions to Ask
Risk, Need, Responsivity (RNR)
- To what extent is your approach to condition setting and enforcement aligned with the principles of risk, need, and responsivity?
- How much time do probation officers spend monitoring and reporting on condition compliance vs. identifying and helping address the underlying reasons for youth’s delinquent behavior?
Reasons to Question
Procedural Justice and Youth/Family Partnership
- Adolescents are antiauthority by nature and less likely to buy into rules or processes if they don’t believe they have been treated fairly.5
- Families are typically not involved in helping establish conditions because they are often treated by juvenile justice systems as part of the problem instead of part of the solution.
Questions to Ask
Procedural Justice and Youth/Family Partnership
- Are youth and families (or other essential support networks like mentors) involved in establishing the terms and conditions of probation?
- How do the terms and conditions of probation support youth and families to achieve their goals and build on their strengths?
- Are families empowered and supported to take responsibility for youth’s success on probation, or is this responsibility relegated to officers and judges? What would be the most effective long-term approach?
Reasons to Question
Practicalities
- Youth (and families) often don’t understand probation conditions and related court orders that are written in legalese, vague terms, and academic language.
- Research has shown a negative relationship between the number of conditions and successful compliance—adolescents in particular struggle to keep track of a long list of requirements.6
- Probation appointments, drug testing, service appointments, court hearings, and other logistics associated with condition compliance can make compliance more difficult.
Questions to Ask
Practicalities
- Do youth on probation know their conditions? Do they understand them? Do their families?
- Are the requirements associated with monitoring and enforcing conditions designed for the convenience and comfort of the system or for youth and families?
Endnotes
1 National Research Council, Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2013), https://doi.org/10.17226/14685.
2 Ibid.
3 Elizabeth Seigle, Nastassia Walsh, and Josh Weber, Core Principles for Reducing Recidivism and Improving Other Outcomes for Youth in the Juvenile Justice System (New York: The Council of State Governments Justice Center, 2014), https://csgjusticecenter.org/publications/juvenile-justice-white-paper/.
4 Ibid.
5 Carol A. Schubert et al., “Perceptions of Institutional Experience and Community Outcomes for Serious Adolescent Offenders,” Criminal Justice and Behavior 39, no. 1 (2012): 71–93, cjb.sagepub.com/content/39/1/71; Jeffrey A. Fagan and Tom R. Tyler, “Legal Socialization of Children and Adolescents,” Social Justice Research 18, no. 3 (2005): 217–241.
6 Amanda NeMoyer et al., “Predictors of juveniles’ noncompliance with probation requirements,” Journal of Law and Human Behavior 38, no. 6 (2014): 580–591.
You just explored Reasons to Question, Questions to Ask—Effectiveness. Be sure to engage with the other modules. Next is Reasons to Question, Questions to Ask—Accountability.
Right now, you are exploring Reasons to Question, Questions to Ask—Effectiveness. Be sure to watch the video, review the information, and engage with the other modules. Next is Accountability.