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Supervising agents serve dual roles as they both help and control the over one million women in the United States (U.S.) on probation and parole as the women strive for lives free of substance abuse and crime. Previous research has found that supervising agent communication patterns have a strong influence on these positive outcomes. Little is known, however, about the precursors to the conversational and conformity communication patterns supervising agents use as they serve these dual roles for their female clients. In this study, which is part of a longer-term investigation of communication between women offenders and their supervising agents, multilevel modeling was used to investigate both the characteristics of the agent and of the women they supervise as precursors to agent communication patterns. Supervising agents’ client-specific conversational patterns were predicted by their typical self-reported …