Career in Parole and Probation
Introduction
Choosing the right career is a pivotal step in ensuring a healthy and happy future. One must have the rights skills and inclinations for the chosen career to make a job fulfilling and rewarding. This is the reason why choosing a career is a long and deep process that requires deliberate consideration of all circumstances surrounding a person’s background, habits and skills. A career in parole and probation is fulfilling for some persons, but may be a burden that must endured by others. Personally, I consider this career path the right one for me. Providing offenders with the right skills and attitude to successfully re-enter society is one of the most noble services that a person can offer not only to the offender, but also to society.
Career in Parole and Probation
I am seriously considering a career in parole and probation because I want to be part of a field, which will soon become one of the most important components of the criminal justice system. Parole and probation belong to the corrections component of the criminal justice system. The other components involved the processing of suspects, proving their guilt, or lack of it, and sentencing them. On the other hand, parole and probation deal with criminals already sentenced preparing them for their re-entry in society. This phase is the future of the criminal justice system because society is realizing that a successful re-assimilation of the criminal matters in society is as important as curbing criminality. In addition, present research is revealing that mass incarceration is failing to curb criminality or deter the occurrence of crimes. Maryland and Pennsylvania, for example, saw a 14.9% and 52.9% rise in incarceration rate in 2002, but while Maryland experienced a 22.5% decrease in FBI index crimes, Pennsylvania posted only a 13.3% (Justice Policy Institute 2002). The implication of this is that the system must find other means of effectively containing crime that will not necessarily take a toll on the country or the state’s resources. One of the solutions is placing more emphasis on punishments serve out of jails. This is why a career in probation and parole will become the thrust in the future.
Probation is a sentencing alternative, while parole is the conditional release of the offender. In the former, the offender serves his sentence outside of prison under the supervision of the probation officer. In the latter, the offender is let out of prison although his sentence is not yet expired. He must also be supervised by a parole officer (Levinson 2002, p. 417). Generally, probation and parole officers do the following tasks: design the rehabilitation scheme for the offender, assist the offender to his reentry to society, such as job training, offer drug and substance-abuse counseling, and write progress reports (BLS 2014).
The entry level requirements for this profession are a bachelor’s degree from any accredited college or university, particularly in the following courses: social work, criminal justice, behavioral sciences, and related fields (BLS 2014). The entry level position for a career in parole and probation involves doing entry-level duties in supervising parolees, probationers, and inmates taking re-entry programs.
Interaction with other Components
The three components of the criminal justice system – the police, the courts, and corrections – both function on their own and in conjunction with each other. The corrections component, to which parole and probation belong, is involved in supervising the incarceration and carrying out of other sentences ordered by courts. In this sense, corrections serve to complete the final phase of the dispensation of justice. This phase is important because without it, all earlier procedures become useless and meaningless. In other words, corrections give teeth to the system. Probation plays a vital role in the court system because it generates reports that are important in the sentencing process. These reports include the offender’s background, the circumstances under which the offender committed the crime and the progress of the offender during probation (Levinson 2002, p. 417).
Both probation and parole also closely interact with the police because one of the functions of corrections is to prevent re-offending by rehabilitating criminals and prepare them for re-entry into society. The police serve as the entry point into the criminal justice system because they apprehend criminals and prevent crimes from happening. If parole and probation fail to do their jobs, the recidivists re-enter the criminal justice system when the police arrest and process them. On the other hand, if they succeed in doing their task and prevent recidivism, they make the task of the police easier. In addition, the jobs of both police and parole and probation officers sometimes overlap. In supervising convicts after their release or those on probation, parole and probation officers make surprise visits to ensure that the persons under supervision do not violate the terms of the parole or probation. Such surveillance-like supervision is in the nature of law enforcement, which is also conducted by the police over the population in general because of their duty of peace-keeping (Banks 2012, p. 180).
Conclusion
A career in parole and probation is one of the noblest professions. It is one of the best services that a person can offer to society and the offender. A parole and probation officer holds in his hand the power and the opportunity to change the life of an offender and make him into a useful and law-abiding citizen of the country. It is not only the offender that has been successfully guided by a parole or probation officer that profits in the end, but society in general. The less offenders and recidivists there are, the better society can pursue the things to be done to make life better for everybody.
References
Banks, C. (2012). Criminal Justice Ethics: Theory and Practice. SAGE Publications.
BLS (2014). ‘Probation Officers and Correctional Treatment Specialists, on the Internet,’ Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2014-15 Edition, Viewed at http://www.bls.gov/ooh/community-and-social-service/probation- officers-and-correctional-treatment-specialists.htm (visited September 30, 2014).
Justice Policy Institute (2002). Effective Investments in Public Safety: Mass incarceration and longer sentences fail to make us safer. Viewed at www.justicepolicy.org//07- 02_FAC_MassIncarceration_AC-PS.pdf
Levinson, D. (2002). Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment, Volume 1. SAGE.
