A hopeful approach: Understanding the implications for the HOPE Program

Hawaii’s Honest Opportuni­ ty Probation With Enforce­ ment (HOPE) program was developed in 2004 as a way to create a more transparent and accountable probation system. An initial examination of the new probation model was promising enough to prompt multiple eval­ uations of the HOPE program, including three studies funded by the National Institute of Jus­ tice (NIJ). The latest study — the HOPE demonstration field exper­ iment (DFE) — which was a strict replication of the HOPE program in four jurisdictions in the main­ land U.S., was not able to replicate the earlier promising findings from evaluations of HOPE in Hawaii. Although the HOPE DFE showed reductions in property and drug offenses, the DFE sites did not experience similar reduc­ tions in probation violations and revocations across the board as was seen in an initial evaluation in Hawaii.1 This article describes find­ ings from three NIJ studies of the HOPE program: the original 2007 Hawaii HOPE experiments, the 76-month follow-up of the origi­ nal Hawaii HOPE cohort and the HOPE DFE. It explores possible reasons for the differences in find­ ings of the Hawaii HOPE and the HOPE DFE, and it concludes with a discussion of the HOPE DFE deliverables and their likely impli­ cations for policy and practice.