Rand Study Calls Wider Probation a ‘Gamble’

Probation, originally designed as a sanction and rehabilitative tool for petty criminals, increasingly is being used in California as a “high-risk gamble” to punish felons who pose a serious threat to public safety, according to a study by the Rand Corp. released Saturday.

Felons now constitute 35% of all adult probationers in the state, Rand found.

The number of adults sentenced to probation from the state’s Superior Courts, which handle felony cases, has increased by 13% over eight years, the researchers said.

But they concluded that the increase is “more alarming” than the figure suggests because “there is some evidence” that felons now being placed on probation “have committed more serious crimes than those who have received probation in the past. . . . And significantly fewer resources are being devoted to their supervision.”

Rand suggested that judges are placing more felons on probation to reserve scarce prison space for the most serious offenders.

However, the researchers noted that courts do not have a good track record of predicting which serious offenders will do well on probation.

In a project financed by the National Institute of Justice, a Rand team tracked 1,672 male felons who had been placed on probation by courts in Los Angeles and Alameda counties.

The researchers found that during 40 months while most of the felons were on probation, 65% of them were arrested, 51% were convicted and 34% were sentenced to jail or prison for new crimes.

They noted that the increase in felons on probation “appear(s) to have crowded out the traditional probationer population--first offenders, petty thieves, drug offenders and disrupters. . . .

“Those . . . offenders who present little threat to . . . society . . . rarely get probation any more. Most of them are never charged, much less convicted. Many of them may ultimately become more serious criminals because the system can no longer afford to ‘notice’ their minor crimes. . . .”

In some California counties, the average caseload for a probation officer is 150 to 300 offenders, the researchers found, and, as a result, these officers often “can do no more than hand their charges a stack of postcards to be mailed in at specified intervals,” rather than monitor their activities in person.