A Statewide Assessment of the Impact of Virtual Check-Ins for Community Supervision

During the COVID-19 pandemic, corrections agencies worldwide began integrating video conferencing technologies to promote safety and security among staff and justice-involved individuals by limiting in-person contact while also maintaining service delivery to reduce recidivism. Since the end of the pandemic, virtual reporting in community supervision has been retained by many agencies; however, little is known about the impact of using this technology to conduct routine check-ins between officers and people on probation or parole. RTI International and its partners, the Georgia Department of Community Supervision (DCS) and Core Correctional Solutions (CCS), propose a statewide assessment of the use of virtual check-ins. . Project activities include establishing a Community/Practitioner Advisory Board; analyzing administrative and case management data provided by Georgia DCS; conducting qualitative interviews and surveys of community supervision officers and people on supervision to understand their perceptions about the utility of the technology for supervision check-ins; pilot testing CCS’s Praxus software application to automatically code recordings of in-person check-ins, captured using body-worn cameras, and virtual check-ins, recorded using Google Hangouts, for fidelity to the EPICS-II model; automatically coding 6,000 recordings of check-ins (3,000 in-person and 3,000 virtual); analyzing fidelity data to compare differences by check-in type; conducting a cost-effectiveness analysis to estimate the cost difference between in-person and virtual check-ins and to see how changes in costs relate to changes in violent or felony arrest rates; and disseminating the results. Expected outcomes include peer-reviewed publications, nontechnical briefs, conference presentations, webinars, podcasts, and an ongoing series of social media content in partnership with an influencer with lived experience. Georgia DCS and other community supervision agencies are the intended beneficiaries of the project. CCS, as a subrecipient, will be responsible for the following activities: coding recordings of check-in sessions for fidelity to EPICS-II using the Praxus application, manually coding sessions for fidelity to assess the accuracy of the application, recalibrating the application as needed, and consulting about the implementation of EPICS-II and interpretation of the study results. CA/NCF