Do Office Reviews in the Federal Probation and Pretrial Services System Do What They Were Intended to Do? Not Yet

• Published in: Federal Probation Vol. 87; no. 2; pp. 3 - 6
• Main Authors: Lowenkamp, Christopher T, Pratt, Travis C, Holsinger, Alexander M
• Format: Trade Publication Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington Administrative Office of the United States Courts 01-09-2023
• Subjects: Business metrics; Criminal investigations; Drug crimes; Firearms; Parole & probation; Public safety; Recidivism; Risk assessment; Supervision; United States > US
• ISSN: 0014-9128; 1555-0303

The team reviews district practices and measures those practices against nearly 200 benchmarks included in the office review instrument.2 While the office review instrument has changed over the years, during the research time frame the office review instrument included some combination of the following areas: firearms and safety; location monitoring; post-conviction supervision; procurement; pretrial services investigations; pretrial supervision; substance use disorder and mental health; and postconviction low-risk policy. The office review instrument is not publicly available, yet the items are relatively pedestrian and audit-based in that they measure the mere presence of-rather than the quality of-activities. For each district, individual-level data were aggregated to create measures that captured the percentage of defendants or offenders that were male, White, U.S. citizen, charged with or convicted of a violent offense, a drug offense, a firearm offense, average risk scores, and average age. Analysis To analyze these data, we estimated proportions and standard errors for each of the six outcomes of interest. Because we have proportions only for outcome measures, rather than for treatment effects with a comparison or control group, it is important to control for differences in the composition of cases across districts (e.g., some districts have, on average, higher or lower risk cases, which could be related both to how a district scores on the office review and how that district performs in terms of outcomes).