Fifth, there should be in each state some state board or commission empowered to inspect, supervise, improve and co-ordinate the work of probation officers throughout the state. Three states—New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont—have state probation commissions, and bills for the establishment of similar bodies were introduced this year in the legislatures of Illinois and Pennsylvania. These commissions do such things as these: they collect reports from probation officers, inspect their work, study methods, recommend improvements and uniformity, supply forms for records, hold conferences of probation officers and of judges, aid in securing the appointment of proper officers and the appropriation of proper salaries, publish statistics and literature, investigate complaints, bring about co-ordination among courts and officers in different parts of the state, and promote desirable legislation. Such commissions, or in the smaller states a probation bureau in some other state department, can be of the greatest value in extending and strengthening the probation service.
Turning next to the organization of the parole system, I ask your judgment as to whether these five principles should not hold equally with respect to the organization of parole officers.
In the first place, we will undoubtedly agree that parole officers like probation officers, should be selected with special reference to their personal fitness for the work. They should have a social sense, and be bent not on spying or intimidating, but on helping. For the same reasons that the dilletante and the policeman fail in probation work, such persons will fail in parole work.
Second, the parole officer should be spared from having more cases assigned to his care than his time permits him to attend to as he should. If fifty probation cases are usually enough to occupy a probation officer, an equal number of parole cases is probably as many as the average parole officer can properly look after at any one time.
Third, the parole officer, like the probation officer, should work in a comparatively small area. This condition is met by the parole system of few institutions—chiefly by those which parole their inmates only in the immediate vicinity of the institution. The parole officers doing parole work for state institutions are usually attached to a single institution, and are expected to look after persons paroled from that institution to widely scattered parts of the state—sometimes throughout the entire state.
For instance, in New York State (which has an area of 47,620 square miles) Sing Sing Prison has one parole officer supposed to cover the entire state for that prison, and Auburn and Clinton Prisons each have a parole officer supposed to do likewise for his respective institution. During 1910, from the eleven state correctional institutions for adults and training schools for children, there were released on parole 3,435 persons. To look after these 3,435 persons as well as those continued on parole from the preceding year, the state employed only 16 parole officers. Each officer served for only one institution. The only state institutions in New York which do not use traveling parole officers are Elmira and Napanoch Reformatories for young men. Persons paroled from these two reformatories to live in New York City are placed under the oversight of agents of the Prison Association or other organizations; those paroled from these two institutions to live in Buffalo are put under an agent of the Charity Organization Society, and those paroled to other localities are placed under the surveillance of police officials. It has been intended, however, to employ traveling parole officers for these two institutions, and for this purpose a civil service examination has been held. Persons paroled from the other nine state institutions, as a rule, are placed under a traveling parole agent attached to the respective institution. The areas covered by these different traveling parole officers range from a few counties to the entire state.[2]
A parole officer required to travel over wide areas cannot know local conditions; he cannot see those on parole often enough; he cannot keep track of their actions; he cannot aid or restrain them when desirable. What sort of supervision or reformatory influence can be exercised by a parole officer who, on account of the wide territory he has to cover, may be able to see a certain John Smith, who is on parole, only once in every two, three or four months? Some parole officers do not see those under their care even as often as this. The officers are forced to rely on written reports, which in many cases are utterly undependable. Parole work at long range and by mail order is necessarily defective and unsatisfactory. Furthermore, the use of traveling officers means large traveling expenses. Each parole officer should preferably confine his work to a single city or single county.
Taking the country as a whole, I fear that the chief criticism to be made of the organization of parole systems is that most parole officers are expected to cover too large areas and to look after too many cases.
This brings us to the fourth principle which we noted as wise to follow in the organization of probation work, and which it would seem, should apply also in parole work. We should avoid unnecessary overlapping. If only one parole officer is needed in a community, why have several? Under the present system in New York State, if each of five institutions—(each with its own parole officer)—paroles a person to the same locality, it would be necessary from time to time for five different parole officers, each attached to a different institution, to go to that locality, each officer to see and inquire about a different person on parole. How much simpler and more effective it would be to have one officer in that vicinity who could look after persons paroled to there from any and all institutions. Volunteers cannot be depended upon; we must have paid officers. Each institution, however, cannot provide a special paid parole officer in each locality. Economy would require that so far as possible all institutions use the same parole officer.
Now if it is wasteful and undesirable to employ two or more probation officers to serve in a territory where one could do the work, and if it is wasteful and undesirable to employ two or more parole officers to serve in a territory where one could do the work, why should we employ in a given area one probation officer to supervise persons on probation, and one or more parole officers to perform practically the same kind of work with respect to persons on parole, provided the work of all these officers could be done equally well by only one officer? In most communities there are not enough parole cases to make it practical to employ a parole officer to deal exclusively with parole cases. In fact, most small places have few, if any, persons on parole at a given time. The local city or county probation officers are already there, and could generally take over such parole cases as require their attention. Except in the few very large centers where there may be enough parole cases to require the entire time of a parole officer, the most rational way, in my judgment, of securing the desirable oversight of those on probation and parole, and of avoiding unnecessary duplication of effort, is to use the local probation officers for both sets of offenders.