Rich Fondo spent years as a Florida probation officer before joining Catalis as a Customer Success Manager. He shares what the public gets wrong about community-based supervision, the realities officers face every day, and why technology should help officers focus on people, not paperwork.
When people think about probation officers, they often picture law enforcement. But according to Rich Fondo, who spent years supervising offenders in Florida before joining the Catalis team, that perception only tells part of the story.
Over the course of his career, Rich worked in investigations, drug offender probation, youthful offender supervision, and sex offender probation. What he learned is that probation sits at a unique intersection of accountability, rehabilitation, and public safety.
To better understand the realities of modern probation work, we sat down with Rich, now a Customer Success Manager on the Catalis Community Justice team, to discuss the challenges officers face, what helps individuals succeed on supervision, and how technology can support better outcomes for both officers and clients.
People Think Probation Is All Law Enforcement
Q: Looking back on your time as a Florida probation officer, what do you think most people misunderstood about the job?
Rich Fondo:
The biggest misconception is that probation is primarily a law enforcement job.
There’s certainly a law enforcement component. In Florida, felony probation, especially public safety, is always a major responsibility. But what people don’t always see is the social services side of the job.
You’re referring people to counseling and working with treatment providers. You’re also helping connect individuals with resources that can improve their chances of succeeding. A lot of the work involves understanding why someone got into trouble in the first place and helping address those underlying issues.
Depending on whether you’re supervising misdemeanor offenders, felony offenders, drug offenders, or sex offenders, that balance can look different. But there’s almost always a combination of accountability and support.
Eileen’s Perspective:
Rich’s point about accountability and support is really the whole design brief for Catalis Probation, part of the Catalis Community Justice Solutions suite. Every activity requirement that a client is assigned (a contact, a drug test, a treatment session) is tracked alongside their achievements and violations in a single record. So, an officer isn’t toggling between a compliance mindset and a case-management mindset; they’re looking at one timeline that shows both.
Catalis Probation also relies on automated workflows. For instance, when a client completes or misses a scheduled requirement, the system will log the corresponding compliance event or infraction on its own, with no separate note to write and no spreadsheet to update. Officers are still the ones deciding how to respond (additional reporting, a referral to a treatment provider), but they’re not spending their time reconstructing what happened first.
There Is No “Typical Day”
Q: What did a normal day look like?
Rich:
Honestly, there really wasn’t a normal day.
One day you might be responding to an incident in the office lobby. Another day you’re conducting field visits. Then the next day you’re reviewing treatment reports and interviewing clients who are reporting to your office. You may spend an entire day conducting search and seizure operations with local, state, or federal law enforcement agencies.
During reporting appointments, individuals would complete questionnaires and provide updates on things like employment, law enforcement contact, counseling participation, and compliance with court-ordered conditions. We would review those responses, discuss their progress, and determine what needed follow-up.
Field work was just as important. You’d visit residences, verify living situations, speak with family members, and gather information about a person’s home environment. Verifying employment is also an important aspect of supervision.
The more engaged you were with your caseload, the better decisions you could make.
One of the Biggest Challenges Is Caseload Size
Q: What’s the biggest challenge probation officers face that most people never see?
Rich:
Caseload management.
Some officers are responsible for a tremendous number of cases. Depending on the type of supervision, you might have more than 100 people assigned to you.
That means you have to constantly assess risk and prioritize your time.
You may have someone on misdemeanor probation for a relatively minor offense, but when you review their criminal history, you realize there are bigger concerns. The challenge is figuring out where your attention is most needed because you simply can’t spend the same amount of time on every case.
Good probation work requires understanding who presents the greatest risk and where intervention can have the greatest impact.
Eileen’s Perspective:
This is where risk and needs assessments earn their place in caseload management rather than becoming another form to file.
In Catalis Probation, an officer completes a risk and needs assessment during the investigation using whatever validated instrument the agency has adopted. The system scores the assessment and carries the results forward into the client’s record, so officers don’t have to recalculate risk every time they decide where to focus their attention.
That same prioritization helps supervisors manage caseloads more effectively. They can:
- Filter dashboards by location and caseload
- View compliance and under-supervision metrics at a glance
- Drill directly from charts into the clients behind the data
- Access individual client records when deeper review is needed
It’s the difference between reviewing every file to find the outliers and letting real-time case oversight point you to them.
What Separates Success from Failure?
Q: In your experience, what separated individuals who successfully completed probation from those who struggled?
Rich:
Attitude was a major factor.
The people who were engaged in counseling, participated in programs, and genuinely wanted to improve their situation were usually more successful.
Family support mattered, too. Stable housing mattered. The quality of treatment programs mattered.
One of the challenges is that many people leave jail or prison determined to make changes but then return to the exact environment that contributed to their problems in the first place. If someone is trying to overcome a substance abuse issue but goes back to an environment where drugs are readily available, they’re facing a difficult uphill battle.
The people who succeed usually have a support network and some level of stability helping reinforce those positive decisions.
Information Drives Better Decisions
Q: How important was timely information when making supervision decisions?
Rich:
It’s critical.
If someone’s entering supervision with a history of substance abuse, you want treatment services in place quickly. You want reports back from counselors. You want to know if issues are developing before they become serious violations.
When I started my probation career, a lot of that information came through mail, fax machines, or phone calls. There were often delays.
The faster officers receive information from treatment providers and program partners, the more proactive they can be. Whether it’s a missed appointment, signs of relapse, or concerns raised by a counselor, timely information helps you take action sooner.
Eileen’s Perspective:
The lag Rich remembers, waiting on a fax or a returned phone call, is exactly what a single shared record is meant to help with.
When a treatment or education session is scheduled in Catalis Probation:
- Attendance gets logged directly to the client’s file by the provider
- Missed session shows up as an infraction the same way a missed office visit would. An officer doesn’t have to wait for a provider to call; they can see it as soon as it’s entered.
Catalis Probation also has automated client reminders and built-in text messaging, so officers can reach clients about an upcoming requirement, or a client can flag a problem, without a delay for a callback or a mailed notice.
It won’t replace an officer’s judgment, but it closes the gap between something happening and an officer actually finding out about it.
The Administrative Burden Is Real
Q: If you could eliminate one administrative burden from probation work, what would it be?
Rich:
Redundant data entry.
Back when I was working as a probation officer, there were countless situations where you had to enter the same information repeatedly.
If information already exists in a case file, officers shouldn’t have to keep typing it into different forms or screens. Every minute spent re-entering data is time you can’t spend working with people.
Technology should make officers more efficient. It should help information flow through the system instead of forcing staff to recreate it.
Eileen’s Perspective:
This common challenge shaped how Catalis Probation handles client information.
When an officer opens a new involvement, the system checks first for an existing match on that client, so a person who’s been through the agency before doesn’t get entered twice. Their prior profile, contact details, and history carry over into the new involvement automatically.
That same principle carries through the workflow. Information captured during the client interview (contact details, living situation, and employment) automatically populates the client’s profile pages, so an officer isn’t retyping it into the next form.
Assessment questions pull in responses already on file from the client’s profile and criminal history where they apply, leaving only the new questions to answer. It solves the issue Rich describes by ensuring officers enter information once, not repeatedly.
Advice for Today’s Probation Leaders
Q: If you were advising probation leaders today, what would you focus on?
Rich:
I’d be constantly evaluating technology.
I’d be looking for solutions that help officers work more efficiently and give them better information. Anything that saves time and allows officers to focus on higher-value work is worth exploring.
One thing I’ve always thought would be beneficial is stronger integration between systems. Probation officers often work on multiple applications at the same time. You might have a case management system, a GPS monitoring system, and several other tools operating independently.
The more those systems can communicate with each other, the less manual work officers have to do.
Eileen’s Perspective:
Rich’s advice is a useful lens for evaluating any probation system. Does it reduce administrative work or create more?
One approach is to bring related supervision activities into a single record rather than requiring officers to move between disconnected systems. In Catalis Probation, electronic monitoring, drug testing, financial obligations, treatment and education participation, contacts, and hearings are all maintained within the same client involvement. That gives officers a more complete view of a client’s case and reduces the need to reconcile information across multiple applications.
It also means the reporting side reflects the same reality officers are working from day to day. The Annual Report dashboard and standard reports like Finalized Contacts and Received Payments pull directly from what officers are already logging, so agency leadership isn’t asking staff to produce a second version of the data for a report. It’s the same record, just viewed at a different altitude.
A Final Lesson
After years working in community supervision, Rich’s biggest takeaway is surprisingly simple: probation is fundamentally about people.
Technology plays an important role, but its value lies in helping officers spend less time navigating paperwork, chasing information, or managing disconnected systems.
The most effective tools are the ones that let officers focus on what matters most: understanding risk, supporting rehabilitation, improving compliance, and protecting the communities they serve.
Built on frontline experience, Catalis Probation is designed to streamline administrative work so officers can devote more attention to supervision, accountability, and client outcomes.