Balancing public safety and social work : an analysis of probation officers’ frontline practices in Belgium

Only a handful of studies have adopted a street-level bureaucracy (SLB) framework to study officer-offender interactions in probation services. Besides the clues provided by criminology research, there is little empirical evidence about how POs use their discretion and how the multiple constraints they encounter at work affect their delivery of services to probationers. Furthermore, little is known about how POs rely on their perceptions of offenders’ trustworthiness to make decisions. While it is generally agreed that frontline workers rely on their assessments of citizens’ key characteri... Mehr ...