ABSTRACT
Elderly Offenders have been largely ignored in research and policy arenas alike. Nationally, offenders who are over 55 years of age represent only about 3% of all offenders—a small proportion of the larger crime problem. But the older offender poses disproportionate problems for a criminal justice system that attempts to deal with issues of equity and punishment. One option available for handling the older offend is known about the older offender on probation. Most research has remained descriptive, using arrest statistics of age, race and sex to speculateer is probation. Gary Feinberg reports that judges prefer probation to other sentencing options 56% of the time; M. McCarthy and R. Langworthy state that the single largest group of adjudicated older offenders are those under community supervision. Despite this strong representation, very little about the social processes involved in offending. The Office of Probation is a division of the Urban Community Services Department, one of 20 city departments.
