Women in Probation and Parole

In an effort to make better use of staff time and ease recruit ment problems, the Washington State Office of Probation and Parole began in October 1965 to assign cases without reference to the sex of the parole officer. Some of the Washington staff objected to female officers' supervising adult male offenders. To evaluate the effectiveness of women in this role and to deter mine how many probation and parole agencies assigned women to male offenders, a survey was made in October 1970 of adult probation and parole agencies in the fifty states, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and the eighty-nine federal district courts.