HOPE Probation

• Published date: 01 November 2016
• Author: Steven S. Alm
• Date: 01 November 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12261

COMMENTARY

HOPE COLLECTION

HOPE Probation

Fair Sanctions, Evidence-Based Principles, and Therapeutic

Alliances

Steven S. Alm

Circuit Court Judge (Retired), Honolulu, Hawaii

My name is Steven Alm, and I am a recently retired circuit court judge in

Honolulu, Hawaii. I conceived of the idea for Hawaii’sOpportunity Probation

with Enforcement or HOPE strategy and, together with our probation officers

and the other criminal justice system partners, implemented it in 2004. I thus read the

recent evaluations of the Department of Justice’s Demonstration Field Experiment (DFE)

(Lattimore et al., 2016, this issue) and Delaware’s Decide Your Time (DYT) (O’Connell,

Brent, and Visher, 2016, this issue) with great interest. Although Texas had some good

outcomes, the others were similar to probation-as-usual (PAU) and I wondered why. As we

have had great success with Hawaii’s HOPE strategy here in Honolulu for nearly 12 years

now, and as other jurisdictions (e.g., Texas SWIFT [Martin, 2013], Kentucky SMART

[Administrative Office of the Courts & Department of Corrections, 2013], Michigan

SSSPP [DeVall,Lanier, and Hartmann, 2011–2013], and WashingtonState Swift & Certain

[Hamilton et al., 2015]) have had independent, evaluation-proven successes as well, I was

curious as to the mixed results I was seeing reported in the DFE and DYT evaluations.

In reading the two evaluations, I came to the realization that the evaluators in both the

DFE and the DYT studies, as well as, apparently, several of the practitioners involved,

unfortunately have a basic misunderstanding of the HOPE strategy.They seemingly believe

that HOPE is simply a sanctions-only program that is solely concerned with imposing jail

sanctions on probationers with no interest in their rehabilitation. Indeed, this is a common,

but flawed and serious, misunderstanding of the HOPE strategy, and it ignores the critical

roles played by the judge, probation/parole officers (POs), and treatment providers in

HOPE. This misconception explains the metrics used/omitted in determining fidelity to

the HOPE model and could have had significant impact on the results of the DFE and

Direct correspondence to Steven S. Alm (e-mail: stevenscottalm@gmail.com).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12261 C2016 American Society of Criminology 1195

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 15 rIssue 4

Commentary HOPE Collection

DYT studies. Given this misunderstanding of the HOPE strategy, let me briefly explain

the HOPE strategy as it really exists, as well as the context and culture in which it was

developed (for a complete description, see the State of the Art of HOPE Probation [Institute

for Behavior and Health, 2015]).

The HOPE probation strategy,as originally conceived and implemented in Honolulu,

Hawaii, in 2004, is a probationer-centered, collaborative strategy among the judge, proba-

tion, defense, prosecution, corrections, law enforcement, and treatment providers to effect

positive behavioral changes in probationers. As I as a judge (recently retired) only saw

probationers for violations, I could supervise a large number, approximately 2,000 of the

6,800, on felony probation or deferral on Oahu.

The HOPE strategy targets higher risk/higher needs probationers by using swift, cer-

tain, consistent, and proportionate jail sanctions for noncompliance with probation con-

ditions while the probation officer and the judge both maintain a working alliance with

the probationer. Here, in Honolulu, within the framework of the National Institute of

Corrections’s (NIC) Eight Evidence-Based Principles for Effective Interventions (EBPs),

HOPE assists probationers in the change process in a caring and supportive environment

to help probationers succeed in probation and in life.

Many probationers resist change, and with PAU, it is often hard to engage with them.

The sanctions component of HOPE promotes ambivalence for change and helps to move

offenders from being externally motivated to being internally motivated by seeing the value

of change (e.g., “I don’twant to go to jail” to“I want to be a better role model for my kids”).

Probationers will be much more sober and much more likely to attend meetings with the

probation officer, as well as much more likely to begin, attend, and persevere in treatment,

be it substance abuse, domestic violence, or sex offender.

In addition to a basic misunderstanding of the HOPE strategy itself, the DFE (Lat-

timore et al., 2016) and DYT (O’Connell et al., 2016) evaluators also fail to differentiate

the HOPE strategy from Swift, Certain, and Fair (SCF). Indeed, the title of the DFE

evaluation refers to both; they use the terms HOPE and SCF interchangeably or together

(HOPE/SCF), and the evaluations purport to be an evaluation of both as if they were one

and the same. That is not the case.

SCF, although inspired by HOPE and incorporating many of its elements, is a swift,

certain, and fair sanctions program that can be used in a variety of community corrections

and penal supervision settings. Even though SCF may well be finding success in various

supervision settings, it is not the HOPE strategy and should not be confused or conflated

with it.

The solicitation for the DFE (Lattimore et al., 2016) evaluation was “Evaluation of

the Honest Opportunity Probation with Enforcement Demonstration Field Experiment

(HOPE DFE).” The authors of the DFE and DYT (O’Connell et al., 2016) evaluations

apparently did not understand the differences between the HOPE strategy and SCF and

conflated the two in their titles, evaluations, and findings. As the HOPE DFE was to be an

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