Perceptions of legitimacy in three forms of probation supervision for people with serious mental illness

Abstract

In the context of criminal-legal community supervision, standard and specialized probation officers are often tasked with coordinating services for adults diagnosed with serious mental illness (SMI) on their caseloads. The coordination of services varies across different programs including traditional probation, specialty probation, and mental health court. Given the proliferation of programs focused on mental health in the criminal-legal system, the perspectives of front-line workers or street-level bureaucrats in criminal-legal agencies are a rich source of information about what is happening on the ground and could provide insights into the potential translational barriers of policy to practice. A deeper examination of probation officers’ understanding of their own legitimacy in matters related to mental health could be helpful in determining what specific skills and levers are being used on the ground, and the connection between these responses and the purported program. In the criminal-legal system, legitimacy is tied to perceptions of fairness and procedural justice. In contrast to standard probation officers, specialty and mental health probation officers mobilize evidence-based interventions, build therapeutic alliances, and utilize their expertise in service of positive probationer outcomes, but in so doing, they often revert to enforcing compliance through more traditional means such as legal leverage