NCJ Number
196150
Date Published
February 2002
Length
29 pages
Annotation
Focusing on the 1997 decision for Iowa’s Parole Board to conduct probation revocation hearings, this report evaluates this experimental project.
Abstract
During the 1997 legislative session, Iowa’s governor recommended that to reduce the workload of criminal court judges and to take advantage of the parole judges’ correctional sanctioning expertise, the legislature should authorize the Parole Board’s administrative law judges (ALJs) to conduct probation revocation hearings as an experiment. Within the Sixth Judicial District, these probation revocation hearings would also reduce the use of appointed counsel in probation revocations and reduce the number of revocations to prison. This report is an assessment of the Division of Criminal and Juvenile Justice Planning’s pilot project to evaluate the impact of the probation revocation hearings on revocations to prison. After explaining that probation violation hearings are treated, in Iowa’s Sixth Judicial District, in the same manner in which parole violations are treated, the author describes how the use of archival data from the files of the Iowa Board of Parole and Department of Corrections were used in conjunction with interviews with members of the justice system in order to assess this pilot study. Through a series of charts and graphs, this report presents its findings indicating that both the probation revocation hearings held by ALJs and the number of disposed cases rose markedly during the time of the pilot study. Finding that this project realigns the allocation of justice system resources rather than reducing them, the author suggests that there is much divergence of opinion as to whether the project makes efficient use of the judiciary and effectively reduces probation revocations to prison.