Probation Program’s Study Design, Essay Example

The Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement (HOPE) initiative created by the Circuit Judge Steve Alm is one of the most efficient probation programs recently initiated in the USA. Its impressive quantitative results imply that the change in the perceptions about probation rules’ efficiency and the promptness of the governmental response to their violation has indeed occurred in the minds of criminals on probation, and that they have started to treat the probation conditions more responsibly. However, the HOPE program is one of the initiatives that should be continuously evaluated for tailoring it further to the needs of the criminal justice system; hence, further research on the efficiency of HOPE’s impact on recidivism is needed.

Upon reviewing the conditions in which the HOPE initiative is enacted, one should note that choosing a quasi-experimental design is much more suitable that using the true experiment or non-experimental conditions. The reason for choosing the quasi-experimental study is that this type of research possesses the advantages of a true experiment, but at the same time, it can be conducted in the natural surroundings, and the participants of the experiment may be unaware of their participation in a scholarly study (Hagan, 2010). The present choice is highly relevant for the criminal justice research, since it is quite hard to isolate a group of criminals on probation for obtaining valid study results. Criminals are tempted to violate the probation conditions once they get into the free environmental conditions in which they can resume taking drugs or alcohol, which usually serves the prime reason for their repeated imprisonment. Hence, a quasi-experimental research design will allow researching the HOPE program’s participants and their non-participating counterparts for the sake of eliciting natural data.

The causality problem has to be resolved before initiating the study; hence, within the framework of this planned study, the researcher aims at creating the experimental model based on the following causal relationship: stricter rules of probation and shorted periods of governmental response to their violation contribute to stricter adherence to these rules by criminals on probation. Hence, the major assumption guiding the planned research is that the feasibility and timeliness of enforcement officials’ response to criminals’ violations of probation terms leads to almost immediate imprisonment, which makes criminals observe the terms with more rigor.

The rival causal relationships that can be considered in this model include the individual urge for rehabilitation, the improved health and social service provision contributing to rehabilitation, the unavailability of drugs in the region reducing the drug intake and increasing the drug tests’ statistical improvement, etc. However, there factors can be excluded from the model because of their insignificance in relation to the major causal relationship – the drugs’ availability can be traced through the criminal records, improvement of social and health services’ provision is included in the HOPE initiative’s framework, and the individual will to rehabilitate is the factor that can be investigated through the control group’s inclusion. Those criminals who are not closely supervised through the HOPE terms are self-reliant in choosing their paths; moreover, the HOPE program’s focus was originally planned as a way for managing the troublesome criminals on probation, i.e., those not highly willing to rehabilitate on their own. Hence, the strength of the causal relationship between participation in the HOPE initiative and rehabilitation can be considered fairly strong.

The proposed study design (as the quasi-experimental design presupposes) includes the pre-experiment measurement in the experimental and control groups, the observation of intervention in the experimental group, and the post-test measurement in both groups. The measurement instrument proposed for the present study is the statistical record on each criminal regarding the number of offenses, frequency of reporting to the probation officer, the presence of an addiction, the number of prison sentences, etc. It is better to compose the sample of person who completed their second or third prison sentence, since the data will be not as rich in case the sample includes those serving their first sentence. The experimental group will consist of troublesome criminals released on probation under the auspices of the HOPE initiative, and will be supervised for about six months in terms of fulfilling the probation terms. The data on appointments’ attendance, successful completion of drug tests, and the overall employment, social rehabilitation, and health service use by HOPE participants. These indicators will be collected before the participants’ release from prison and will relate to their previous probation; the same will be done for the control group participants. After the experimental period of six months, the same indicators will be collected for each experimental group and control group participant, with the exclusion of participants who were involved in a serious criminal offense within that half a year, and were repeatedly sent to prison for a lengthy term.

As the U. S. Department of Criminal Justice (2008) indicated in the article about HOPE, the research to investigate the effectiveness of the HOPE initiative has mostly been quantitative up to date. However, there is a need to understand the attitudes, perceptions, and meanings attached to the initiatives like HOPE by the law enforcement officers, probation officers, and criminals on probation. Hence, an inclusion of a qualitative dimension into the planned study is also advisable. The questionnaire with open-ended and closed-ended questions will be generated to identify the expectations of all three groups of respondents regarding the outcomes of HOPE. Afterwards, the same questionnaire will be disseminated in six months for all three groups of respondents to evaluate the feasibility of outcomes for them within the past half a year. The questionnaire will be aimed for only the experimental group of criminals on probation, since the control group will not be able to assess the effectiveness of the HOPE initiative.

References

Hagan, F. (2010). Research Methods in Criminal Justice and Criminology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

S. Department of Justice (2008). HOPE in Hawaii: Swift and Sure Changes in Probation. National Institute of Justice, NCJ 222758, pp. 1-2.