Community supervision will continue its existence in the future; however, further modifications will be imposed. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, community supervision had relatively stable high success rates during the last decade (Abadinsky, 2018). This implies that community supervision will be used more often, as it helps to decrease the expenses of the criminal justice system and control the population of prisons. However, the central problem for probation and parole remains the selection procedure (Abadinsky, 2018). Judges need to have clear criteria and comprehensive information about the offenders to use probation and parole as sanctions. The criteria should be based upon the latest evidence acquired from rigorous research in the sphere. In other words, before applying any reformation to the current system, experimental and correlational studies are required to understand what populations are best suited for various kinds of community supervision.
I believed that the future of probation and parole is in giving the community supervisors the ability to utilize swift and certain sanctions when a violation is revealed. The rationale behind the idea is that the certainty of apprehension is more likely to improve public safety than the severity and length of punishment. Therefore, the future of community supervision is in the empowerment of parole officers and implemented evidence-based strategies to improve the system.
References
Abadinsky, H. (2018). Probation and parole: Corrections in the community (13th ed.). New York, NY: Pearson Education.