Effective community supervision can be promoted by situating community corrections officers within the same communities that probationers and parolees on their caseloads live and ensuring that the officers become familiar with the particular resources and challenges of those communities. If community supervision officers work solely from an office (especially an office located far from the places that individuals under supervision conduct their lives), they will miss opportunities to access corroborative information on the activities of the individuals on their caseloads, to recognize the challenges or risks that these individuals may face, and to engage nontraditional community partners in efforts to improve the capacity and efficiency of community supervision. Potential partners such as community political leaders, faith-based leaders, and extended family members, make up a local culture that can support each individual's successful readjustment, fail to support such adjustment, or even create problems that hinder successful reintegration. A community corrections officer who works among these community members can become personally knowledgeable about the community's dynamics, personalities, resources, and tensions as they relate to the individuals on his or her caseload. With such knowledge, the officer can serve as an advocate to ensure the strengths and resources of the community are leveraged to support each individual's readjustment; the officer can also identify community threats and risks and take steps to ameliorate them.

In order to facilitate the activities of supervision officers in the field, supervision agency administrators and other policymakers should consider setting up satellite offices within neighborhoods to which high concentrations of offenders return and should tailor caseloads to minimize the time that supervision officers or the individuals that they supervise must spend traveling to appointments. Co-locating community corrections offices with service providers (such as Workforce Investment Boards or benefits offices) can encourage compliance with conditions of release and successful engagement with those services.

Example: Proactive Community Supervision, Maryland Division of Parole and Probation

Maryland's Division of Parole and Probation and the University of Maryland's Bureau of Government Research have undertaken a re-engineering of Maryland's supervision practices. Under Proactive Community Supervision, agents' caseloads are reduced so that they can spend more time in neighborhoods and work one-on-one with individuals whom they supervise. They develop relationships with the families, friends, and neighbors of these individuals to help establish an early-warning system and enable a quick response to problems that may arise. The agents have offices in the community, including in churches, and work closely with service providers. In one neighborhood, a facility has been developed which houses a clinic and employment training space in addition to the parole and probation offices.

Supervision agents should not have to rely on a traditional office for access to case files. With the advent of wireless, web-based technologies and the proliferation of cell phones, agents should be able to access agency information systems from remote locations easily. Used creatively, technology allows for the development of virtual offices, where agents can operate efficiently and effectively from the field.

Example: Tablet PCs, Georgia Division of Parole

Georgia's parole officers are using tablet PCs (highly portable, laptop-like computers with detachable keyboards and screens that can function as writing slates) to record data about parolees while they are on duty. Before implementing this system, the Board of Pardons and Paroles found that information from notes taken by hand was sometimes not sufficiently thorough or was not properly entered into the data system. The Division of Parole is in the process of creating a statistical-analysis application to analyze data recorded by parole officers. Every night, officers will replicate their field-collected data to a server. A program will then look at different factors in the data and recalibrate risk levels to guide the allocation of supervision resources.