Addendum to the Final Report of the Court Support Services Division’s Probation Transition Program and Technical Violations Unit

Court Support Services Division within the Judicial Branch designed and implemented two pilot probation programs that sought to decrease probation violations and subsequent incarceration. These programs were the Probation Transition Program (PTP) and the Technical Violation Unit (TVU). A final evaluation report of these programs was prepared in January of 2006. The initial report consisted of a process evaluation of the implementation of the PTP and TVU with a short term outcome assessment of probationers' violation rates during their 120 day participation in the PTP and TVU. The following document is an addendum to that report. Of these program participants, 917 (51%) were in the PTP and 889 (49%) have been in the TVU. The Bridgeport office had the most PTP (268) clients followed by the New Haven office (175). For TVU, the Waterbury office had the most clients (178) followed by the Hartford office (177). One Year Effectiveness Assessment A one year effectiveness was conducted that compared probation violation and reincarceration rates between the PTP group, PTP comparison group, and the TVU group one year after clients had been enrolled in these programs. This study found that the overall probation violation rate was the highest for the TVU (59%), however, the PTP comparison group had a higher violation rate (52%) than the PTP group (36%). For all three groups, the violation rate increased by LSI risk level. This finding was most pronounced in the PTP group. PTP Probationers with low risk levels had a very low violation rate (7%) while 52% of surveillance PTP probationers were violated. There were also significant differences between the PTP and PTP comparison groups in technical violations. The PTP technical violation rate (14%) was significantly lower than the PTP comparison group technical violation rate (26%); the TVU technical violation rate was 31%. The differences in new arrests and new arrests and technical violations between these the PTP and PTP comparison groups were not statistically significant. The PTP and the TVU groups had significantly lower reincarceration rates than the PTP comparison group. That is, of all probationers who participated in PTP, only 17% were reincarcerated compared to 41% for the PTP comparison group (the TVU reincarceration rate was 24%). Summary of One Year Assessment First, PTP participants had significantly lower probation violation rates than the PTP comparison group (36% to 52%) one year after these split-sentenced probationers were released from prison. This difference was directly …