Carry Out a Free Georgia Probation Search (Online Lookup)

Run a free Georgia probation search to find details of offenders living under court supervision in the state.

As a means of offering rehabilitative alternatives to incarceration, probation provides specific terms and conditions for convicted offenders who show a genuine openness to changing for the better. Its key difference from parole is that parole is a supervised release from prison as part of an existing sentence, often at the end of a sentence for good behavior.

This article educates citizens about these distinctions and providing guidance, resources, and links. It also offers an overview of the best probationer information sources in the state of Georgia.

How To Perform a Free Georgia Probation Search

For a probation search in Georgia, the most useful and accessible resources are available through specific counties.

A few databases are available at the state level that can be directly or indirectly useful, but they aren’t free, and the Georgia Department of Corrections’ Offender Query applies only to people in the prison system.¹

For that reason, this summary mostly focuses on the local scale, with the notable exception of a state-level department that’s tasked with handling felons in community service across the state.

Georgia’s Department of Community Services (DCS) was created to coordinate felony supervision in the state and manages some 200,000 offenders in a typical year. It consolidates parole and probation supervision and makes it possible to assign officers to offenders as needed based on where the offenders reside.

If it’s known where an offender is living, contacting the local DCS field office is likely to be the simplest first step toward finding their probation officer. Getting in touch with a probation officer can lead to further information, especially in cases where public safety or the health and safety of the offenders themselves may be at risk.

At the federal level, an inmate locator for the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) is available for free public use online.² It can be searched by name or inmate number and provides searchers with a means of voicing concerns about an inmate if needed.

For purposes of this article, it can function as a supplement to information searches, confirming whether an offender in the state of Georgia also has a record in the federal prison system.

Check County & Municipal Agencies for Georgia Probation Records

Some more populous counties offer case look-up services that provide summaries of civil and criminal cases and their outcomes, which can be used for a probation search in Georgia. The State Court of Cobb County, for example, offers the free “Court Connect” online probation search where you can find cases by the name of the defendant.³

Where applicable, these summaries may note whether sentencing for the offender involved probation.

DeKalb County’s Chief Probation Officer (CPO) would be the first point of contact in the area for finding a specific officer for non-felony supervision cases. This would require visiting the office physically — which does require being subject to search — or conducting business by phone.

The DCS Field Office model still applies in most Georgia counties, however, with the upside of making it a potential starting point of research for more than just checking someone’s probation status (see below). There’s a field office for Fulton County in Atlanta, along with a companion Court Services office.

A field office in Lawrenceville serves Gwinnett County, with another office in Marietta serving Cobb County.⁴ DeKalb and Chatham Counties, respectively, are served by field offices in the municipalities of DeKalb and Savannah.

Third-party providers may also be a useful source of information. These non-governmental providers can check a variety of record types in multiple states, and they compile data from sources beyond government databases, such as social media.

Verify a Probationer’s Violations in Georgia & Contact Their Supervising Officer

A probation search in Georgia can also provide awareness of violations, which aren’t an uncommon problem.

Probation is essentially the conditional gift of an alternative to being incarcerated and a chance to seek rehabilitation and reform. Many probationers struggle with their conditions and can wind up slipping back into patterns of criminality and defiance of authority. In doing so, they can create chaos not just for themselves but for the people around them.

States generally treat offenders absconding from probation as a serious concern for public safety, making timely intervention a major priority. Informed members of the public have a role to play here. The DCS Field Office infrastructure covered above would be the primary resource for this kind of inquiry and reporting in Georgia.⁵

Further examples of this, in addition to those already linked above, would be the field office in Morrow serving Clayton County or the office in Canton that serves Cherokee County.⁶

There are no free online searches for this kind of purpose, and the field office route requires either in-person visits or phone calls, but effort can be worth it for its contribution to the community.

View Details of Parolees Throughout Georgia

When an offender absconds from parole, they’re actively pursued by the Department of Corrections in the state, along with other agencies as applicable.⁷

All the concerns that come with probation absconders are, if anything, magnified with parole jumpers. It’s the kind of situation that can have serious implications for community safety, which makes it important for members of the public to be able to report and access information freely.

A positive feature of Georgia’s Department of Community Services is that its field offices are a kind of “one-stop shop” for information about both probation and parole. The same offices you’d call or report to when seeking data on an offender’s probation status are the ones you’d visit to seek information — or supply information — about a parolee.

Just as with probation information, accessing parolee details in Georgia will typically involve a call or in-person visit to one of these field offices.

When conducting a Georgia probation search, it’s clear that “going local” is the best option; county-level resources are the clear front-runner among the potential sources of information in the state.