Eric Martin - Testing What Works in Probation: Replicating HOPE

• What is HOPE?
• What were the initial findings of the HOPE evaluation?
• What is NIJ's current involvement with HOPE?
• Is there any variation between the Hawaii HOPE program and the four evaluation sites?
• What will the site evaluations consist of?

What is HOPE?

Eric Martin The Hawaii HOPE Program started in 2004. Judge Steven Alm and Chief Probation Officer Cheryl Inouye created the program because they saw the same offenders coming before them in the court for the same offenses, mostly drug-involved offenses, missed appointments, dirty urine tests, not meeting with their counselor if they're in some kind of treatment program.

And under the normal paradigm of probation, a probation officer is not likely to revoke probation on the first violation. They like to work with the probationer and try to correct the behavior. But what it amounts to is, one probationer may accumulate up to 14 violations before the probation is revoked and they're sent back into incarceration.

Judge Steven Alm felt that was inherently unfair, that you're not dealing with the issue as they arise, but instead letting them persist and then giving a very harsh sanction. So, HOPE started as a method to give a swift sanction for each violation but make it relatively short, two to three days in jail, and then the probationer comes back out and works again with the probation officer. They retain their status on probation.

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What were the initial findings of the HOPE evaluation?

Martin The initial HOPE evaluation, conducted in part by NIJ, looked at drug-involved offenders who were in the HOPE program. They chose to only focus on drug-involved offenders just to make the comparisons between the offenders easier. HOPE is more than just a program for drug-involved offenders.

They found dramatic reductions, in both dirty urine analysis tests, missed appointments, and also revocations and recidivism.

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What is NIJ's current involvement with HOPE?

Martin NIJ is actually engaged currently in two HOPE projects. One is the HOPE demonstration field experiment with our partner BJA. We're replicating the HOPE program in four different sites on the U.S. mainland.

There's also a second initiative led by Dr. Hawken, who conducted the 2007 evaluation, to do a five-year follow-up with the original HOPE probation. NIJ and the rest of the research community is really interested to see if those initial findings that came out of the 2007 evaluation carry out in a long-term basis. Does this have a lasting impact?

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Is there any variation between the Hawaii HOPE program and the four evaluation sites?

Martin When we had to translate the components of Hawaii HOPE to the four jurisdictions on the U.S. mainland, there was quite a bit of variation. As anyone who's familiar with the system, probation is under the sheriff's office in some localities; it's under the department of corrections in other localities. The courts may or may not have the authority to do certain things. There may be caps on the amount of time you can give a probationer without revoking the probation.

So, HOPE has had to be grafted to all those separate considerations in each of the localities. But the retention of the swift and certain sanctions piece has been carried out. Now, it may be, the probation officer may have police powers in certain localities. So the apprehension of the individual is not as big an issue. In others, they may have to create an enhanced warrants service with the sheriff's office or the local police department. So, minor variations in that, but it's all—the attempt is to try to get as much consistency on that swift and certain sanctions piece as possible.

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What will the site evaluations consist of?

Martin The evaluation will consist of randomized control trials at each of the four sites. Approximately 200 probationers will be assigned the HOPE treatment condition and 200 probationers will remain what we call "probation as usual." They just receive regular probation.

The evaluation team is going to conduct a process, outcome, and cost evaluation. The process evaluation will look at probationer, probation officer, and other key stakeholders' attitudes to the sense of how did it change workload—even with the probationer, how did it impact your experience on probation? The outcome evaluation will look at all of the main components of the original 2007 evaluation: missed appointments, dirty drug tests, revocations, and then recidivism. The cost evaluation part will take the results from the outcome study and then compare it to the cost.

Now, the cost is very interesting for HOPE because, at the front end, it may actually increase costs. With these short jail stays, you have quite a bit of churning, where you have offenders coming in for relatively short periods of time and then being released. That does create a burden on the sheriff's office or whoever runs the jail system. But then the long-term benefits, if we're reducing incarceration on the whole, there may be cost savings. So the cost piece is very complex in this issue.

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