SURE BEATS WORK.(The Talk of the Town)(federal probation officer)(Chris Stanton)

When Chris Stanton was a federal probation officer in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, he specialized in keeping an eye on organized-crime figures who had recently been released from prison. "In some ways, they were the easiest offenders to supervise," he recalled the other day. "They knew how to play the game. They did exactly what you asked them to do. If you said, 'Show up Tuesday at four,' they'd be outside your door at three-fifty-five. If you said, 'Bring in your tax returns,' they brought them in on time. But if you went to see them at their job they were never there. The challenge was that you knew they weren't." And then Stanton started to laugh. The supervisory life has grown more complicated since then. Stanton, who for the past dozen years has been the chief probation officer for the Southern District of New York, finds himself having to address a more metaphysical quandary: What, exactly, is work?

On April 19th, Martha Stewart attended a cocktail party and gala dinner, at the Time Warner Center, that was billed as a "celebration" of Time's "100 Most Influential People" issue. The evening seems to have been convivial, although Jon Stewart (no relation), who performed at the party, did note, after Martha's departure, that he had seen her "fashion a shiv out of a lamb shank." Her attendance raised certain questions, however, because, influential or not, she remains under home confinement after her conviction, last year, for, among other things, making false statements to federal prosecutors. The terms of Stewart's probation allow her to leave home for up to forty-eight hours a week for "employment," medical and dental appointments, food shopping, and religious observance. The question that Stanton's office is now investigating is whether the party constituted a genuine work obligation or mere socializing.

"No one really knows what a probation officer does," Stanton said, with cheerful irritation, in his office in the federal courthouse downtown. He is sixty years old, mostly bald, and has a bushy mustache, and when he's not on the street he wears a holster (empty) and a badge on his ...