The STARR Model of Community Supervision: Current Research and Future Directions

The U.S. Probation and Pretrial Services system is responsible for providing pretrial services, presentence investigations, and post-conviction supervision for the federal Judiciary. The mission of the system is to facilitate the fair administration of justice, enhance public safety, and positively impact the lives of the individuals who become involved with the federal courts. Federal probation and pretrial officers play a critical role in meeting these objectives through their oversight of the individuals on their caseload. The use of evidence-based practices during officers’ interactions with clients under their supervision is critical. 

Evidence-based Community Supervision Practices

Evidence-based practices in community supervision involve the use of scientific research and other available data to guide decisions related to agency policies and practices in ways that aim to reduce recidivism and improve outcomes for people under supervision. Over the past several decades, national correctional rehabilitation efforts have been largely informed and supported by scholarship on the principles of effective intervention. At the center of this approach is the Risk-Need-Responsivity Framework.

The Risk-Need-Responsivity  framework can be illustrated as follows:

Criminal psychologists have also identified a core set of practices that can be used to improve the therapeutic effectiveness of correctional interventions, including: 

• anticriminal modeling,
• effective reinforcement,
• effective disapproval,
• effective use of authority,
• structured learning,
• problem-solving,
• cognitive restructuring, and
• relationship skills.

Despite the empirical support for these strategies, observational research has shown that community supervision officers often fail to implement these principles and practices with fidelity. In response, community supervision officer training programs, like the Staff Training Aimed at Reducing Rearrest (STARR) model in the U.S. federal system, have been developed.

STARR has been widely implemented throughout the U.S. Probation and Pretrial Services system to help its officers become more effective agents of change. Staff become certified in STARR through attending trainings and demonstrating an ability to perform its skills; newly trained officers audio-record interactions involving the use of STARR skills and share them with their assigned coach for feedback; all staff attend regular booster sessions throughout the year for refresher lessons and opportunities to rehearse skills. 

An evaluation by staff from the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts found that trained officers not only exercised greater use of STARR skills but also that the individuals they supervised had lower failure rates. Although this study provides support for the ability of STARR training to increase officer use of skills and improve client outcomes, the authors noted that subsequent research was needed to test and confirm the conclusion. 

Evaluating STARR: Insights on Officer Use, Client Outcomes, and Policy Impact

RTI’s Dr. Ryan Labrecque (a former Probation and Parole Officer for the Maine Department of Corrections and current Senior Manager in the Corrections and Reentry Research Program at RTI International) and Dr. Jill Viglione (an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Central Florida) collaborated with the U.S. Probation Office Middle District of Florida to produce a series of publications on the use and impact of STARR. 

• Probation Officers See Value and Limits in STARR Program:One study assessed probation officer attitudes towards STARR. Most trained staff members who participated in the interviews indicated positive perceptions about the program, including its usefulness for managing caseloads and helpfulness of coach’s feedback regarding their use of skills. Trained and untrained officer respondents, however, also expressed some doubts regarding the ability of STARR to reduce recidivism.
• Policy Boosts STARR Skill Use, But Gaps Remain in Probation Practice: A second investigation examined the district’s efforts to increase probation officer use of skills. More specifically, a new policy was implemented that required officers to use STARR skills during their one-on-one client contact sessions at least eight times per month. Study findings revealed that officer reported use of skills increased from an average of 4.6 per month pre-policy to 13.5 skills per month post-policy. Despite this significant increase, trained officers reported using STARR skills in only a quarter of their total interactions with clients.
• STARR Training Shows Promising Yet Mixed Impacts:A third evaluation provided mixed support for the ability of officer training in STARR to improve client outcomes. The results indicated that clients supervised by STARR-trained users and coaches had fewer revocations of probation and new arrests than those monitored by untrained officers but also had more technical violations and positive urinalysis tests. 

• Targeted STARR Skill Use Reduces Recidivism for Higher-Risk Clients:A fourth assessment found that higher risk clients with more exposure to STARR skills had lower rates of recidivism than those with less exposure, while lower risk clients who received greater doses of such skills had similar or higher rates of recidivism relative to those who received smaller doses. These findings emphasize the value of prioritizing the use of STARR skills for higher versus lower risk clients.

Collectively, these studies provide support for the continued use of STARR among federal supervision populations. They also highlight the need for and importance of continued research on the use and impact of STARR on officer, client, and system outcomes. 

In a recent meta-analysis of 25 studies of officer training in evidence-based community supervision practices grounded in the risk-need-responsivity principles, Dr. Labrecque and his colleagues concluded that was associated with an increase in officer use of core correctional practices and a decrease in client recidivism.

This systematic review of the literature also highlighted several directions for future scholarship, including a need for more methodologically rigorous research on the implementation and effectiveness of these training programs on larger and more diverse samples of officers and clients. The study also called for additional research to examine the potential role that client (e.g., demographics, crime type, risk level) and officer characteristics (e.g., professional experience, skill use proficiency) have in mediating the impact of these programs on outcomes of interest.

Experts from RTI’s Corrections and Reentry Research Program are actively involved in advancing this body of work through several research and evaluation projects on best practices in community supervision.