Risk and Rehabilitation: Supporting the Work of Probation Officers in the Community Reentry of Extremist Offenders

To date, very little research has examined the specific challenges that individuals with ties to extremism face when reintegrating into their communities after arrest or incarceration. This has produced significant gaps in the scholarship on extremism, including a lack of data on terrorist recidivism from which to devise effective post-release supervision and support strategies. The implications of this knowledge gap extend beyond the halls of academia to matters of national security. Indeed, the United States is currently seeing an unprecedented surge in the number of individuals being released from custody due to their involvement in extremism. Without a robust research literature dedicated to this population, probation officers and service providers are without the scientific knowledge they need to help formerly incarcerated individuals achieve reintegration success.

This project sought to address these challenges by focusing on three primary research objectives:

1. Build on existing NIJ-funded research to provide criminal justice professionals empirical data and rigorous analysis on the characteristics of U.S. extremists, their risks for recidivism, and their needs for reintegration success.
    
2. Gather evidence from in-depth interviews of pretrial services and probation officers, service providers, and system-involved individuals to understand the keys to successful reintegration.
    
3. Identify the training and education needs of pretrial services and probation officers to help them more effectively support the cases of formerly incarcerated individuals with links to extremism.
    

Our mixed methods approach leveraged: (1) an extension to the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) dataset designed to estimate instances of both ideological and non-ideological recidivism amongst system-involved individuals with ties to extremism; (2) interviews with pretrial services and probation officers, service providers, and system-involved individuals to understand the needs and challenges this population faces during disengagement and reintegration; and (3) a survey of probation officers to identify the training and education they need to better support their releasees.

View Publication