November 1, 2012
1 hour
At the start of my senior project I knew that I wanted to do something that involved working with troubled youth, so I met with a Stacy Dagne who has been a probation officer in San Mateo County for the past several years. Before becoming a probation officer Stacy worked at a correctional facility in Oregon where she worked with adult inmates but then decided that she wanted to become a probation officer. Her job as a juvenile probation officer has been to work with kids and offer alternative such as programs and meetings. She believed that most of the kids that entered the system were simply troubled and misguided not just bad kids. As a probation officer she gets to know them in school, outside of school and in their homes. Because she got exposed to their personal lives she was able to clearly understand why some kids acted the way they did. Many times the conditions that these kids are living in aren’t right. Some have parents that just provide food, but are emotionally neglecting their children, others have parent who abuse them emotionally or physically while other don’t have parents that are active in their lives. If she were to see any signs of neglect or abuse she holds the right to call Child Protection Services (CPS), so that a child is removed from such an environment. Depending on the offense that the adolescent has committed she is in charge of setting a curfew for them, randomly check-up on them to ensure they’re staying out of trouble, pee testing them for drugs and alcohol or making it mandatory for them to attend meeting or receive counseling. Something that she loved most about her job was the fact that she was the one person that had faith in a kid and tries to show them that there is hope and not everything is lost. The one thing that is an everyday challenge is seeing that for some kids it is too late and you just can’t help them. Over the years of experience she has observed that a lot of the kids that enter the system as first time offenders think that they will get away with things, when it doesn’t exactly work that way. I learned that probation officers are dressed like anyone else but are a mix of law enforcers. The probation department has numerous paths you can go such as juvenile probation, adult probation and many more. The main goal of a probation officer is to try to rehabilitate people. They prepare recommendations to supervisors and the court.
