THE MISSISSIPPI LEGISLATURE

When inmates are released from prison on earned release or parole, or when defendants receive probation from the courts, it is the responsibility of the Department of Corrections’ Division of Community Services to supervise these persons. Supervision consists of meeting periodically with these individuals and monitoring their whereabouts and activities. The Division of Community Services’ Region IV, located in southern Mississippi, provides these services through a network of nineteen local offices.

PEER’s review assesses how well MDOC’s Region IV:

• maintains custody and control of the supervision fees it collects from persons under its jurisdiction;

• allocates personnel resources to supervise individuals under post-release supervision; and,

• trains personnel.

MDOC’s Central Office does not maintain an accurate census of post-release supervisees and Region IV personnel do not sufficiently account for fees collected from these individuals. These conditions create an environment that exposes the department to increased risk of fraud and embezzlement.

These matters have been called to the attention of the department before in reports of the State Auditor. The Division of Community Services has suffered from embezzlement in the past and such a situation could occur again if the department does not strengthen its control over fees collected.

MDOC has not established a standard system of workload management for field officers. Consequently, when managers assign cases to field officers, they use any method they wish. This results in officers carrying varying workloads which do not reflect the degree of difficulty associated with overseeing different types of cases or the risk to society posed by particular types of supervisees.

Other states and professional organizations are developing workload management systems that would require that officers be given sufficient time and resources to manage their responsibilities.

Field officers in Region IV currently spend approximately 45% of their time carrying out clerical duties such as maintaining files and collecting supervision fees. These are tasks that could be performed by paraprofessional staff, leaving field officers with more time to conduct supervision work.

While MDOC policy requires that field officers receive forty hours of mandatory annual training, many officers do not receive this training. This creates a risk that field officers will not have the knowledge necessary to provide supervision to persons under their supervision. In reviewing some recent cases involving field officer relations with the courts, PEER found two cases in which judges have become displeased with field officers’ performance. Despite this problem, Region IV management has not provided remedial training for officers who have had performance-based disciplinary problems. This failure leaves the courts and the department with no assurance that the problems underlying poor performance have been addressed and remedied.

Despite the importance of policies and procedures in providing employees an understanding of how they are to perform their work, Region IV does not make policy manuals available to all of its field officers. This places a burden on senior officers who must serve as a source of knowledge as well as supervision for less experienced field officers.

1. The Legislature should require that circuit court clerks provide the MDOC Central Office with reports of persons who are to be placed on probation or under intensive supervision at the same time they notify the regional offices. Further, MDOC should require that at minimum, all supervisees reported to it from whatever source be entered into its computer files within fifteen days of the receipt of a record.

2. MDOC should review the procedures of each local office in Region IV and develop unified procedures for the handling of funds. Specifically, these procedures should maximize use of current personnel resources and should require the following:

   1. When possible, payments should be collected by one person instead of by each officer. For small regional offices with limited staffing, the MDOC Central Office should assist by overseeing the collection of supervision fees in order to help preserve segregation of accounting duties.

   2. When the checks or money orders are received (cash should not be accepted), the persons receiving the money should complete a triplicate pre-numbered receipt. The person under supervision receives one copy, the bank receives one, and one should go with the supervision file. No receipts should be voided by persons collecting the fees.

   3. Someone other than the persons collecting the fees should reconcile the fees collected with the receipts.

   4. The persons collecting the fees should make daily deposits. They may use a bank bag specifically for that purpose and pick it up the following day with the certified bank deposit slips.

   5. A monthly report illustrating daily deposits for the month’s deposits should go to the MDOC comptroller or his designee, in addition to the deposit slips and bank statement.

      Each office should have a separate bank account. At the end of the month, all accounts should be transferred to a central account.

3. MDOC should require that each probation and parole officer report to the Region IV office the names of all persons who have received judicial waivers from fees and all persons who are in arrears even if they have received no waivers. This report should be made on a monthly basis.

4. MDOC should review other states’ case assignment and workload management methods and use this information to develop a uniform system of workload management. Such a system should allocate supervisory resources based on the risk posed by different types of cases and should ensure that some officers are not unduly overloaded.

5. MDOC should conduct a detailed study of the tasks assigned to its field officers and determine how it could reduce the burden of clerical work placed on its field officers. MDOC should consider reallocating existing resources to make paraprofessional staff available to field officers to relieve them of their clerical case management burdens.

6. MDOC should ensure that all of its field officers receive training in accordance with its policies and procedures and that they fulfill mandatory training requirements.

   Because of recent difficulties with members of the judiciary, the department should insure that all field officers receive training in professionalism and relations with the courts. Also, any field officer who has received a reprimand should receive remedial training in a topic related to the deficiency that caused the reprimand.

   Following such training, each field officer should receive a copy of the policy and procedure manual for use and reference throughout the year.

7. Using this report as a guide, MDOC’s Division of Community Services should review the operations of other regional offices regarding collection of supervision fees, allocation of personnel resources, and training.