On Probation: Serving a Probationary Sentence in North Carolina

Monday, October 14, 2019
Price: 
$16.00
When you purchase this book, your credit card statement will show a charge to Longleaf Services, the School of Government’s fulfillment provider.

For this Spanish translation, click here.

This book, sold in packs of 10, is about probation. In North Carolina, probation is a form of punishment in which a defendant can avoiding serving a suspended term of imprisonment by complying with a set of conditions imposed by the sentencing judge. If the probation is supervised, the defendant will have a probation officer—an employee of the North Carolina Department of Public Safety who monitors the case and reports violations to the judge. Probation can also be used to monitor a person’s compliance with a diversion program like a deferred prosecution or conditional discharge (for example, “90-96,” a diversionary option for certain drug possession crimes). 

Probation is not to be confused with post-release supervision or parole. Those are supervision periods that follow a person’s release from prison, and which are managed by the Post-Release Supervision and Parole Commission in Raleigh, not by the courts. Probation comes before a term of imprisonment. In fact, if a person does well on probation, he or she will never go to prison at all. 

This is the second issue in a series of graphic novels explaining North Carolina’s sentencing laws. Presenting the information in illustrated form is by no means intended to make light of a serious topic. It is, rather, offered as an accessible way to explain a complicated subject. It is meant to give crime victims, defendants, inmates, probationers, and their families an understandable resource that translates the words and numbers on a sentencing judgment into a practical reality. I hope it will be useful to judges, lawyers, and probation officers, too.

First issue—In Prison: Serving a Felony Sentence in North Carolina

Publication date: 
Monday, October 14, 2019
Author: 
James M. Markham
ISBN: 
978-1-56011-951-7
Page count: 
18
Price: 
$16.00