A Biosocial Study of Client Outcomes in Probation and Parole: The Role of Officer Stress and the Officer-Client Relationship

在美国，近390万成年人正在接受缓刑和假释(即社区监督)，是被监禁人口的两倍多。在导致重新监禁的事件发生时，监狱人口中约有三分之一是接受社区监督的人。缓刑和假释官(PPO)是社区监督的一线工作人员，是改变当事人结果的重要因素。这个项目研究了PPO相关因素，特别是PPO压力和PPO与客户的关系，可以为针对PPO的干预提供信息，使他们更好地为改善社区监督结果做好准备。高质量的PPO-客户关系被认为是核心纠正做法之一，突出了PPO-客户关系在实践中的突出地位及其作为干预交付机制的重要性。PPO担负着执法者和社会工作者的双重角色，以确保公共安全和客户成功重返。在如此复杂的工作中，角色伴随着各种压力，包括身体威胁和情绪衰竭。为了成为有效的干预交付机制，PPO与客户的关系需要PPO刻意培养，而PPO压力可能会阻碍这些努力。这一项目将有助于了解如何减少累犯和促进数百万前罪犯重新融入社会，这一成果反过来又将减少与重新监禁和重新融入社会失败相关的社会成本。由于旨在使有前科的罪犯重新融入社会的刑事司法干预措施都涉及提供干预措施的代理人与委托人之间的个人关系，该项目促成了一个更大、更广泛的问题，即代理人的压力如何影响代理人与委托人的关系，从而影响干预的成功。该项目将加强学术界和机构之间的伙伴关系，为实践提供信息，并促进来自代表性不足群体的学生从事具有高度政策相关性的跨学科研究。研究人员采用生物社会学的观点来调查PPO压力和PPO-客户关系对客户结果的影响。他们将使用并行的多方法小组设计，每6个月收集一次来自佐治亚州社区监督部的150名PPO及其750名高风险客户的数据，共4次。研究人员将从PPO收集唾液样本(用于压力生物标记物)和调查数据(用于自我报告的压力源和PPO与客户的关系)；根据机构记录构建客户的重新融入和再次犯罪结果。PPO-客户关系的客观衡量将通过观察员评级从PPO-客户互动的视频记录中得出，这是分布式控制系统常规数据收集的一部分。研究人员还将探索使用新技术的效用，该技术实现了一种广泛使用的面部编码系统，以处理客户在互动过程中的面部情感表情，作为关系质量的代理。结果滞后的多水平结构方程模型将被用来解决研究问题。调查结果将填补关于PPO压力对客户累犯和重新融入结果的影响的重大知识空白，并产生关于刑事司法干预的有效交付机制的知识。这一裁决反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Nearly 3.9 million adults are under probation and parole (i.e., community supervision) in the United States, more than double the incarcerated population. About one-third of the prison population are persons on community supervision at the time of the event leading to their reincarceration. Probation and parole officers (PPOs) are the frontline workers in community supervision and are important agents of change for client outcomes. This project studies PPO-related factors, specifically PPO stress and PPO-client relationship that can inform interventions targeted at PPOs to better prepare them to improve community supervision outcomes. A high-quality PPO-client relationship is considered one of the Core Correction Practices, highlighting the prominent position of the PPO-client relationship in practice and its importance as the delivery mechanism for interventions. PPOs assume dual roles of law enforcer and social worker to ensure public safety and clients’ successful reentry. With such complex job roles come with various stressors including physical threats and emotion exhaustion. To be an effective delivery mechanism for interventions, the PPO-client relationship requires deliberate cultivation by PPOs, and PPO stress can impede these efforts. This project will contribute to the knowledge of how to reduce recidivism and facilitate the reintegration of the millions of former offenders, outcomes that, in turn, would reduce societal costs linked to reincarceration and failure of reintegration. As criminal justice interventions aiming to reintegrate former offenders all involve personal relationships between an agent who delivers the intervention and a client, this project contributes to the larger and broader issue of how the agent's stress affects the agent-client relationship and, consequently, the intervention's success. The project will increase partnership between academia and agency to inform practice and promote the development of students from underrepresented groups to engage in interdisciplinary research of high policy relevance. The researchers adopt a biosocial perspective to investigate the impact of PPO stress and PPO-client relationship on clients’ outcomes. They will use a concurrent multi-method panel design and gather data from 150 PPOs and their 750 high-risk clients in the Georgia Department of Community Supervision (DCS) every 6 months for 4 waves. The researchers will collect saliva samples (for stress biomarkers) and survey data (for self-report stressor sources and PPO-client relationships) from PPOs; construct the clients' reintegration and recidivism outcomes from agency records. Objective measure of PPO-client relationship will be derived by observer ratings from video recordings of PPO-client interactions, part of DCS's routine data collection. The researchers will also explore the utility of using novel technology that implements a widely used facial coding system to process clients' facial expressions of emotions during interactions as a proxy for relationship quality. Multilevel structural equation modeling with lagged outcomes will be used to address the research questions. Findings will fill in a significant knowledge gap regarding the effect of PPO stress on clients’ recidivism and reintegration outcomes and generate knowledge regarding effective delivery mechanisms for criminal justice intervention.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.