Tele-Supervision and Tele-Work – Where do we go from here?

Written by Eric Tumperi | 6/11/20 12:00 PM

CorrectTech is supporting the work American Probation & Parole Association (APPA) is doing to communicate what is new and needed in technology for community corrections agencies in a time of change and increased remote work. We would like to share this article recently published on the APPA website and encourage you to engage in the APPA community on this topic and more.

This is the first installment in a series of short articles and blogs from the APPA Technology Committee on the implications and opportunities community corrections agencies face when entering the domain of tele-supervision and tele-work. While all corners have experienced first-hand the recent and fairly immediate adoption of technology to perform work and deliver services remotely, these phenomena are certainly not new to industry at large, nor even to the field of probation and parole. The impact of social distancing and stay-at-home orders as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a major driver in changing operations and practices in all facets of the community corrections field.

Tele-supervision and Tele-work

In this opening installment, we outline some foundational elements that we believe are keys to successful implementation of tele-supervision and tele-work. Our aim is to focus on leveraging commonly available technology suited to maintain consistent and quality contacts with clients (tele-supervision) as well as enable streamlined remote work for staff (tele-work). While you will see references to a variety of off-the-shelf products and solutions, we endeavor to provide Key Considerations and Evaluation Criteria for each topic we cover.

Context and Definitions:

Tele-supervision: We are not inventing something new here. Rather, we have decided to define a term for better understanding of our body of work. Most of us are familiar with tele-health, including the increased role it is playing during the COVID-19 pandemic. Early experiences with partial and full-scale tele-supervision has occurred in our field, but remained a fairly nascent concept until the immediate onrush of “forced trials” of tele-supervision as a result of social distancing orders across the world. For our field, we are defining tele-supervision as:
- Technology-aided interaction between agency/staff and clients under community supervision – explicitly where these interactions are not conducted face to face. This includes applications in probation, parole, community corrections, pretrial supervision, and treatment delivery.