Organizational Programming and Capacity Assessment

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Hamilton County is the county seat for Cincinnati and the third most populous county in Ohio with over 800,000 residents. The Hamilton County courthouse is located in downtown Cincinnati and houses both the Common Pleas and Municipal Courts. Both courts have their own probation departments; however, the chief of probation heads both departments. The Common Pleas Probation Department has 79 employees and 9 open positions. Probation officers report to Common Pleas Judges; there are a total of 16 judges in the General Division. The department is organized into several probation units that supervise persons on probation with varying levels of risk and need based on their offense. The judges rely on probation supervision as a rehabilitative alternative to incarceration and think it is vital that the services offered by the probation department are goal oriented and effective at mitigating a person’s risk of future engagement with the criminal legal system. The local judiciary is requesting an assessment of current probation agency practices and programming to identify areas that could be improved to align with evidence-based practices that are supportive of promoting and sustaining behavior change for persons under probation supervision. Further, the judiciary requests that the assessment identify best practices that will assist agency leadership and staff in gaining a better understanding of how to implement practices and programming that are supported by research, identify and track key performance measures, and obtain other data that has not previously been collected by the probation department to measure success. Finally, Hamilton County is seeking recommendations for tools to improve organizational readiness that department leadership can use to ensure strategic continuity of the implementation of processes and practices to ensure long-term success.

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