Probation Officer Roles in the Past , Present and Future of the Criminal Justice System Probation The chief means of supervising criminals outside confinement It is an alternative to imprisonment Considered to be a modern sentence , but it has its roots in earlier forms of withholding punishment Often referred to as the suspended sentence Duties of Probation Officers According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Website , the role of the probation officers are :Duties of Probation Officers Probation officers also investigate the backgrounds of the accused , write pre-sentence reports , and recommend sentences

. They review sentencing recommendations with offenders and their families before submitting them to the court Probation officers may be required to testify in court as to their findings and recommendations . They also attend hearings to update the court on offenders ' efforts at rehabilitation and compliance with the terms of their sentences

History

According to Williams , Formby and Watkins (1982 , the origins of modern probation in America are often traced to the work of John Augustus , a Boston shoe manufacturer and civic reformer of the 1840s and 1850s Augustus had a shop on Franklin Avenue in Boston near the police court . One day , he was in court observing as a member of the Washingtonian When Augustus spoke to a man convicted of drunkenness and decided he could be reformed . The judge let Augustus bail him , and Augustus guaranteed the court that the alcoholic would appear for sentencing three weeks later That man became the first official ' probationer . He stopped drinking . When Augustus took him back to court , he looked neat and healthy . The judge was d

Probation at Present

Petersilla (1998 ) revealed that probation was originally very decentralized under the control of local courts , but over time the trend has been toward centralization of adult and juvenile probation at the state level - most often as a division of the state department of corrections As probation developed at present , it meant a status or a sentence under the general authority of the trial judge , but in practice the means for carrying out probation varied widely . No standard model of probation administration developed , with the result that today probation administration differs from city to city and state to state

Case Loads For the probation officer , a caseload refers to the number of clients supervised by the probation officer For those states in which probation officers are supervising only probationers (including all felons and misdemanants , the official average caseload per officer in the year 2000 was 133 (Camp Camp 2002 ,

. 195 When probation officers were also supervising parolees , official caseloads were lower , averaging ninety-eight per officer (Petersilia 1998 ,

. 38 This is why minimizing the caseload have been argued to make parole officers more effective . Petersilia (1998 ) cited that Arizona has the best probation officers because they limited the parole officer 's caseloads to sixty

New Perspective in Probation Broken windows probation is derived from the broken windows model of policing suggested in a 1982 essay by James Q . Wilson and George...