What Is Probation, Anyway? Reflections from a Decade of Research
![handle is hein.journals/fedsen36 and id is 187 raw text is: What Is Probation, Anyway? Reflections from a Decade
of Research
I first started thinking about probation during graduate
school. Like many sociologists, I had not paid much atten-
tion to community supervision. Instead, I was focused on
incarceration, trying to find a dissertation project that
would let me track how life behind bars had transformed.
But that changed when I completed my general exams-the
end of formal coursework for the doctoral program. For my
exam in punishment, my advisor Devah Pager asked me to
explain how each stage of the criminal justice system-
from courts to community corrections and prisons-had
changed over time and the implications for race and class
inequality. I had eight hours to answer.
In between frantic bursts of writing, I had an ah-ha
moment: sociologists knew next to nothing about
probation! Even the books and articles written on commu-
nity supervision tended to focus on parole, or release after
prison. Few were taking seriously the most common form
of correctional supervision. And so, I started asking a set of
questions that by 2013 had produced a dissertation on the
rise of mass probation.
At the time, it felt like shouting into the void. The field
since then has shifted, however, with academics, policy-
makers, and people with system involvement increasingly
mobiliiing against the harms of mass supervision.
Nowhere is this dearer than in public concern over
technical violations, a process by which people can be
jailed for as little as a missed appointment with a probation
officer or a positive drug test. But we have yet to move from
concern to action. In that spirit, I want to use this space to
offer a few critical questions or even provocations: What
exactly is probation? What is its relationship to drug use and
testing? What is probation's role in the criminal justice
system? Ultimately, these questions push us to ask how we
might change-or even abolish-drug testing in probation.
In 2016, the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal
Justice launched a study on probation and parole revocations.
The research team wanted to know how jurisdictions could
interrupt the revolving door of incarceration fueled by
supervision violations. Working with counties across four
states, staff crisscrossed the country, conducting focus groups
with adults on probation (and, separately, with probation
officers). The focus groups asked participants to reflect on
their experiences under supervision-providing a window
onto the meaning of probation for those directly impacted.
The focus groups concluded with what might have been
a generic question, standard in qualitative interviews: Is
there anything else you'd like to tell us? But in one session,
a man provided an answer that was anything but generic:
What inspired this to even happen? I'm completely sur-
prised. Somebody cares? Because the whole feeling I've got
through this whole thing is that I'm a piece of trash and
nobody really cares .... You're criminal. You're guilty. You
know if they burn you with cigarettes, who cares? I mean,
that's pretty much the attitude I get. For that person on
probation, the experience of supervision had been defined
by neglect and suffering-they were human trash aban-
doned to abuse (see Phelps and Ruhland 2021). Even just
being asked in a focus group about how he felt about pro-
bation was, for him, a novel signal that somebody cared.
Contrast that with this experience from Donna,
a woman on probation in Minnesota interviewed by
a member of my research team in 2019 for another study:
I just want to say, all the times that I've been to jail, I was
never offered treatment as a helpful tool, [an] alternate to
incarceration. As a matter of fact, I wasn't offered it, so I
would plead guilty just to get out of jail quicker and go back
out and do the same thing. That's why I have 26 arrests
and ... well, 26 convictions. ... And it's finally good to get
myself back on track even if that means going through
probation. Without that, I wouldn't be, you know, I
wouldn't be in drug treatment. Donna spoke movingly
about her past experiences of sexual abuse, explaining that
her drug use had become a way of dealing with the trauma
or, as she put it, to not deal with it. The supportive ser-
vices provided though probation were, for Donna, critical to
finding housing and therapy, facilitating a process of
recovery (see Piehowski and Phelps 2023). As she con-
cluded: I've been through a lot in my life where it's hin-
dered me, but it's also made me stronger.'
How do we make sense of these differing understand-
ings of what probation as an institution does and of what it
can offer people? In my work over the past decade, I have
come to see that the focus on sobriety, drug testing, and
substance use treatment programs is at the heart of both the
promise and perils of probation. The purpose of this com-
mentary is to summarize some of these lessons and explore
what they might tell us about the future of mass probation.
Federal Sentencing Reporter, Vol. 36, No. 4, pp. i77-i8o, ISSN 1053-9867, electronic ISSN 1533-8363-
@ 2024 The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Please direct requests for permission to photocopy
or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page,
https://online.ucpress.edu/journals/pages/reprintspermissions. DOI: https://doi.org/lo.I525/fsr.2024-364.177.
FEDERAL SENTENCING REPORTER * VOL. 36, NO. 4 * APRIL 2024
MICHELLE S.
PHELPS
Associate Professor,
Department of
Sociology,
University of
Minnesota
This is an edited
version of the
keynote address
delivered by
Professor Phelps at
the convening,
Drug Testing and
Community
Supervision:
Interrogating Policy,
Practice, and
Purpose, held in
Columbus, Ohio,
November 2-3,
2023.
177](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/fedsen36&div=27&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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What Is Probation, Anyway? Reflections from a Decade of Research
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