The effectiveness of the parole officer-parolee relationship is dependent on the parole officer’s ability to create and maintain positive relationships with parolees on their caseloads ( Dowden and Andrews, 2004 Landenberger and Lipsey, 2005 Jolliffe and Farrington, 2007 Morash et al., 2014). In the parole officer-parolee relationship, parole officers may function as agents of change who encourage parolees to comply with the conditions of parole, engage in specialized programs, and promote pro-social behaviors and identities ( Gibbons and Rosecrance, 2005 Abadinsky, 2009) or alternatively, parole officers may foster an adversarial relationships with their parolees ( Ireland and Berg, 2007 Morash et al., 2014 Chamberlain et al., 2017). Historically, and to a large degree today, the role of the parole officer is to assist in the successful reentry of individuals who have been released from prison while monitoring their behavior and the terms of their release (e.g., maintaining employment and stable housing, abstaining from alcohol and drugs) in sum, responding to their criminogenic and non-criminogenic needs to ensure community safety ( Seiter, 2002 National Research Council, 2008). We suggest that this effect occurs via self-expansion, a mechanism that supports positive downstream outcomes for both parole officers and parolees.Īt year-end 2019, there were 878,900 individuals under parole supervision ( Oudekerk and Kaeble, 2021). Using a sample of parole officers, we investigate the implicit association of the self with the group parolee following a positive (versus negative) interaction with a parolee. The present study is the first to our knowledge to examine implicit self-cognitions among actors in the justice system. Only recently has implicit social cognition been studied in samples of justice-involved people ( Rivera and Veysey, 2015, 2018 Veysey and Rivera, 2017). Automatic or implicit cognitions, such as bias, also may affect interactions between actors in the justice system (e.g., between citizens and police officers, parolees and parole officers). Bias, of course, can be a conscious cognitive process, and, importantly, it also can operate automatically outside of conscious awareness (for reviews, see Gawronski and Payne, 2011). Much of the extant research assumes that decisions are arrived at in a thoughtful considered way, and, despite this, that bias often influences these decisions. We say, “justice is blind,” yet we know that extra-legal factors (e.g., race, gender) are often associated with various law-related decisions, including arrests (e.g., Fielding-Miller et al., 2020), verdicts and sentencing (e.g., Cohen and Yang, 2019), and parole release decisions (e.g., Huebner and Bynum, 2008).
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