Please find a template or an example of a field report used by a probation officer in their line of work. Reference all academic sources used.
Please be thorough and hit distinguished in the scoring guide.
Review Appendix A, "Model Reports," in Report Writing for Criminal Justice Professionals, on pages 315–336.
Review Appendix B, "Examples of Agency Instructions for Completing Report Forms," in Report Writing for Criminal Justice Professionals, on pages 337–408.
- Preparing the report -- you're writing a full report on a case of your choosing (*not* a Jared Remy case -- please choose something from your own work, from the newspapers that you find on your own, or from your own imagination). You need to find and use an appropriate template for a form if your report would be filed in a form. If you would have a different structure for your report, be sure to follow an appropriate model for that. Our textbook has models (you'll find them in this week's reading, right?), but you will find many more online by searching for the type of report you're writing and adding the word "sample" or "example" to your Google search.
Preparing Your Field Report
Narrative writing is a key element in the various writing (and reading) tasks that you will engage in your criminal justice career. You will see that we are now engaging that narrative further and mobilizing it in the field report that you are looking at this week.
- As we finalize the drafts of the narratives, you should also be seeing how the narrative fits the field report, and how it is so integral to the story that is told in the report.
You have each chosen a particular character to profile in Units 1 and 2. That character aligns with a subfield of criminal justice—a career path, in other words. Using that career path, find an appropriate report for the field to complete (you may use the textbooks, the library, and the internet to help you, but please do ask the instructor for help with this, as well, if you need it). You will likely find a form or template-like model to follow for many of these positions, but for some (like attorneys), you will not have forms to fill out.
For the assignment in the upcoming unit, you will write a field report that follows one of the models of the reports a criminal justice professional is likely to write on a regular basis, similar to what you learned about this character from your profile in Units 1 and 2. You may have many reports to choose from for some characters, and few for others. This is natural.
Peer Review of Field Report Task
Based on the preparation you did in the previous unit's study, for this discussion, you will submit the rough draft of your field report for peer review. Be sure to review the complete assignment instructions in Unit 7 to complete your draft. The revision of your report, based on peer feedback, will result in the final draft of the narrative in Unit 7.
Week 7 instructions, so you get it right...
Final Field Report Task
For this assignment, you will finalize your field report draft submitted in the previous unit's discussion. Building upon what you learned in the Unit 6 study for this assignment's preparation as well as the Profile and the Narrative assignments, choose one type of field report and draft it. You may be drafting a police incident report, an internal affairs investigation report, a parole report, et cetera. You may find and use a template for the report, as appropriate.
You should expect to write between 2 and 7 pages, depending upon the type of report you are completing and its purpose; and you should complete the following tasks to draft your report:
Write a report to satisfy the chosen purpose, making appropriate use of detail and presenting information clearly, fairly, and persuasively.
Apply strategies for structuring the field report effectively.
Use the accepted style and form of the field report to develop a central point in an organized document.