Tempered Radicals: Considering Street-Level Community Corrections Officers and Supervisors’ Divergence from Policies

Abstract Every day, community corrections staff make complex decisions in an uncertain environment, affecting their workload, supervisees, and public safety. These micro-level decisions have the cumulative potential to influence the overarching goals of the organization as well as probationers themselves. While focal concerns theory is a well-developed explanation of decision-making in courts and policing, within the community corrections context, scholars have only applied the framework to specific reforms or decisions. Using ethnographic data from a community corrections agency and a grounded theory approach we extend the focal concerns perspective, and uncover how and why frontline supervisors and officers diverge from an array of policies. A spectrum of policy divergence themes emerge suggesting collective action between staff and policies. Findings reveal emergent rationale for why staff make micro-level divergent decisions, and how the collective action of officers and frontline supervisors serves as tempered divergence, ultimately altering the implementation and fidelity of policy.