Introduction

The heart of probation and/or parole supervision is face-to-face contact, which involves the interaction between the individual under supervision and the authorising government official (or in some rare instances, a contractual employee). Face-to-face contacts are an opportunity for the government official to communicate the goals of supervision, review progress, and modify plans to accommodate the status of progress.

Under an enforcement (compliance) model of supervision, such contacts take the form of monitoring adherence with a focus on ensuring that the supervisee is abiding by the rules of supervision. A social work framework focuses on obtaining services depending on court orders, or trying to address behaviours that are causing problems on supervision. A refined model – behavioural management – is postured as an approach that bridges the two polar extremes but focuses on the officer using cognitive restructuring strategies to identify those factors that are drivers of criminal conduct and that identify factors to make progress in reducing the risk of further involvement in criminal conduct (Taxman, 2008).

The behavioural management approach has been reclaimed as the Risk-Need-Responsivity (RNR) model of supervision, which has been found to be the most effective supervision strategy to reduce recidivism in two meta-analyses. Drake (2011) found that this model reduced the risk for recidivism by 16% as compared to no change in recidivism with intensive supervision models (with surveillance only) and a 10% reduction with intensive supervision with treatment. Chadwick and colleagues (2014) also found that clients of officers trained in CCP had a lower recidivism rate as compared to clients of officers not trained in CCP, with the rate of CCP trained officer clients being 13 percentage points lower than that of non-CCP trained officer clients. Collectively, the research appears to confirm that supervision face-to-face contacts can be enhanced by using these strategies. The unanswered question is what are the strategies considered critical in this new model of supervision?

This chapter explores the content of curricula that are considered part of the RNR supervision framework, examining the core components. More importantly, the review will ask the question of whether the revised face-to-face contacts under these frameworks are different from practice in a compliance-driven model.