<p> Discovering the relationship between the occupational stress of community supervision officers (CSO), their supervision orientation and community supervision outcomes will improve the field of community corrections with respect to CSO job satisfaction, work performance, turn-over rates, workload distribution and training officers in evidence based practices. It also expands already rich research on offender recidivism. An ex post facto non-experimental quantitative design was used to describe the relationship between the independent variables (IV) under observation: the occupational stress level and supervision orientation of CSOs, and the dependent variables (DV): the number of client arrests on the caseloads of CSOs, the offenders&rsquo; successful completion of community supervision, the offenders&rsquo; unsuccessful completion of community supervision, and the number of violation reports a CSO sends to the releasing authorities for offenders on their caseloads. Two survey instruments called the Job Stress Survey (JSS) and the Revised Community Corrections Officer Orientation Scale (RCC) were used to collect data from CSOs. Multiple regression analyses of the IVs and DVs concluded that there was no statistically predictive relationship between the occupational stress and supervision orientation of CSOs. Additionally, there was no statistically predictive relationship between the occupational stress of CSOs, their supervision orientation, or community supervision outcomes. This research began a valuable discussion about the influence of stress on CSO interactions with their offenders, which may influence offender noncompliance with community supervision. Further research should include a larger representation of CSOs, so that more variables can be incorporated into a study for a more robust analysis.</p>

<p> There are limitations to traditional methods of capturing the dynamics of violent interactions. These limitations are due to outcome driven approaches, data sampling issues, and inadequate means to capture, express, and explore the complexity of behavioral processes. To address these challenges, it is proposed that &ldquo;violent offending&rdquo; be re-framed as an emergent feature of a complex adaptive social system. This dissertation abstracts and computationally implements a theoretical framework that forms the basis of a complex social simulation of the violent offending process. The primary outcome of this effort is a viable synthetic offender that emerges from simulated interactions between potential offenders (subjects) and potential victims (targets) within an environment. The results of calibrating this model to a real-world murder series are discussed, as well as, the comparison metrics used to assess goodness-of-fit of simulated and real-world event-sites. A synthetic offender promises valuable insights into individual offending trajectories, offender tactical processes, and the emergence of geospatial and temporal behaviors. Furthermore, this approach is capable of reproducing the violent offending process with sufficient detail to contribute new scientific understanding and insights to criminology and the social sciences.</p>