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How Little Supervision Can We Have?
Abstract
Use of probation and parole has declined since its peak in 2007 but still intrudes into the lives of 3.9 million Americans at a scale deemed mass supervision. Originally intended as an alternative to incarceration and a means of rehabilitation for those who have committed crimes, supervision often functions as a trip wire for further criminal legal system contact. This review questions the utility of supervision, as research shows that, in toto, it currently provides neither diversion from incarceration nor rehabilitation. Analysis of national supervision, crime, and carceral data since 1980 reveals that supervision has little effect on future crime and is not a replacement for incarceration. Case studies from California and New York City indicate that concerted efforts to reduce the scope of mass supervision can effectively be achieved through sentencing reform, case diversion, and supervisory/legal system department policy change, among other factors, without increasing crime. Therefore, we suggest extensive downsizing of supervision or experimentation with its abolition and offer actionable steps to enact each possibility.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 6 is January 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
... To our knowledge, this is the first study exploring the CHS role within community supervision. With the national call for fundamentally reforming probation (Lopoo et al., 2023), our findings support a continued effort to consider the many responsibilities placed upon probation officers. They are asked to be a blend of both law enforcement and social services; to be both a referee and a coach (Lovins et al., 2018). ...
A randomized controlled trial was conducted to assess the experiences of women probationers engaged in gender-responsive supervision with community health supports versus 'gender-responsive supervision as usual.' Treatment group participants engaged in a new supervision model in a large metropolitan county in a Western state which was created to improve their specific responsivity needs and public health supports. The Women's Reentry Assessment, Programming, and Services (WRAPS) model included enhanced wraparound, gender-responsive, and trauma-informed supervision that incorporated Community Health Specialists (CHSs) working alongside probation officers. Although the WRAPS intervention did not reduce recidivism relative to the control group, there is evidence that gender-responsive probation supervision does reduce recidivism overall when compared to baseline. Findings from interview data indicate strong support for gender-responsive probation in general and the WRAPS model in particular. Clients and staff viewed the CHS role as highly impactful in addressing women's specific responsivity needs and supporting women's success. Recommendations surrounding gender-responsive probation and integration of public health staff are discussed.
... More importantly, recent reviews of contemporary supervision question its overall effectiveness and highlight that the "less is more" philosophy may be misguided given the current state of empirical evidence (Doleac & LaForest, 2022;Lopoo et al., 2023). As shown here, it is clear that there is limited empirical evidence in support of SCF/HOPE, and for the field of supervision more generally (Mackey et al., 2022). ...
Research Summary
Originated nearly two decades ago in Hawaii by Judge Steven Alm, a community supervision‐court model known as “Project HOPE” proposed to reduce probation failure by responding to violations with immediate but short jail terms. Despite negative evidence from Lattimore and colleagues’ 2016 Demonstration Field Experiment (DFE) across four locations, advocates continued to trumpet programs based on Project HOPE's core principles of swift, certain, and fair (SCF) sanctions, arguing that these deterrence‐oriented interventions—now known under the acronym SCF programs–reduce recidivism. To assess this claim, a meta‐analysis was conducted of 18 studies reporting on 24 separate evaluations of programs falling under the Project HOPE/SCF umbrella. The analysis revealed that the intervention had a statistically significant but substantively small impact on recidivism (the main overall effect = −.058). Moderator analyses revealed weak to null findings across variations in methodological and HOPE/SCF program characteristics.
Policy Implications
At present, evaluation evidence is weak and not robust enough to support the continued government funding and implementation of SCF programs in their current form on grounds of recidivism reduction. Such deterrence‐oriented programs may be based on a flawed theory of recidivism that fails to identify criminogenic risk factors for change. SCF programs might prove more effective if integrated with treatment modalities, though this remains to be demonstrated. More broadly, a range of community supervision approaches now exist that emphasize building relationships with individuals under supervision and guiding their prosocial development. These alternatives might offer a more promising avenue for reform than current programs based on SCF principles.
This discussion piece emerged out of a conversation about the words we use to describe people who are engaged in and by the criminal justice system. It is underpinned by our belief that language, including the ways we describe people, has important effects in the world. The piece consists of two parts: a brief critical introduction, and a creative dialogue which reflects upon ten key words that have been used to describe people on probation.
While incarceration has proven detrimental to mental well-being, it remains unknown if community supervision is better for mental well-being than incarceration. Our objective was to explore the individual- and community-level relationships between community supervision and mental well-being and to examine inequities by race. We conducted 20 in-depth interviews with individuals on community supervision (e.g., probation, parole) in North Carolina and conducted thematic analysis separately by race. For many, criminal legal involvement began at a young age, often due to substance use for White individuals or over-policing for Black participants. The themes were: (1) “It’s a Thursday. Move on.”: surviving over the life course in the context of the criminal legal system; (2) “Merry go round of death”: the criminal legal system as a trap; (3) “I love you, but I have to love you from over here”: social support as a double-edged sword while on community supervision; and (4) “ [Probation] ain’t nothing but a rope to hang yourself”: mental health issues created and exacerbated by criminal legal involvement. Individuals’ experiences on community supervision were often dehumanizing and difficult, preventing them from achieving well-being. This system must be redesigned to meet individual and community needs.
Background
Research on the health consequences of criminal legal system contact has increasingly looked beyond imprisonment to understand how more routine forms of surveillance and punishment shape wellbeing. One of these sites is probation, the largest form of supervision in the U.S. Drawing on an interview study with 162 adults on probation in Hennepin County, MN, in 2019, we map how adults on probation understand the consequences of supervision for their health and how these self-reported health changes correlate with individual, social, and structural circumstances.
Results
Roughly half of participants described their health as having improved since starting probation, while the remainder were split between no change and worsened health. Examining both closed-ended survey questions and open-ended interview prompts, we find that the “gains” of supervision were correlated with substance use treatment (often mandated), reduced drug and alcohol use, increased housing and food security, and perceptions of support from their probation officer. However, these potentially health-promoting mechanisms were attenuated for many participants by the significant “pains” of supervision, including the threat of revocation, which sometimes impacted mental health. In addition, participants in the most precarious circumstances were often unable to meet the demands of supervision, resulting in further punishment.
Conclusions
Moving beyond the “pains” and “gains” framework, we argue that this analysis provides empirical evidence for the importance of moving social services outside of punishing criminal legal system interventions. People with criminal legal contact often come from deeply marginalized socio-economic contexts and are then expected to meet the rigorous demands of supervision with little state aid for redressing structural barriers. Access to essential services, including healthcare, food, and housing, without the threat of further criminal legal sanctions, can better prevent and respond to many of the behaviors that are currently criminalized in the U.S. legal system, including substance use.
How might parole operate as a labor market institution, and how might it contribute to the governance of poverty and social marginality? Drawing on a series of correctional, employment, and arrest records for a cohort of parolees in Michigan, we show that parole generally supervises a jobless population, but also oversees a significant number of people who work. We also find evidence that parole, contrary to many expectations, increases the odds of employment. However, we do not find convincing evidence that parolee employment alleviates individual poverty or reduces the odds of recidivism. These results inspire a conceptualization of parolefare, another poverty regulating regime that successfully motivates worker-citizenship but does little to extend or protect the life chances of the poor.
One of the goals of imprisonment is to reduce violence¹. Although imprisonment has risen dramatically since the 1970s, its effects on future violent crime are poorly understood². This study’s objective was to examine the effect of imprisonment on violent crime in the community among individuals on the policy margin between prison and probation sentences. Drawing on data from a population-based cohort of individuals convicted of a felony in Michigan between 2003 and 2006 (n = 111,110) and followed through June 2015, we compared the rates of commission of violent crime committed by individuals sentenced to prison with those of individuals sentenced to probation using a natural experiment based on the random assignment of judges to criminal cases. Being sentenced to prison had no significant effects on arrests or convictions for violent crimes after release from prison, but imprisonment modestly reduced the probability of violence if comparisons included the effects of incapacitation during imprisonment. These results suggest that for individuals on the current policy margin between prison and probation, imprisonment is an ineffective long-term intervention for violence prevention, as it has, on balance, no rehabilitative or deterrent effects after release.
Research Summary
Recent declines in imprisonment raise a critical question: Can prison populations be reduced without endangering the public? This question is examined by testing the effect of California's dramatic efforts to comply with court‐mandated targets to reduce prison overcrowding using a pretest‐posttest design. The results showed that California's Realignment Act had no effect on violent or property crime rates in 2012, 2013, or 2014. When crime types were disaggregated, a moderately large, statistically significant association between Realignment and auto theft rates was observed in 2012. By 2014, however, this effect had decayed and auto theft rates returned to pre‐Realignment levels.
Policy Implications
Significant reductions in the size of prison populations are possible without endangering public safety. Within just 15 months of its passage, Realignment reduced the size of the total prison population by 27,527 inmates, prison crowding declined from 181% to 150% of design capacity, approximately $453 million was saved, and there was no adverse effect on the overall safety of Californians. With a mixture of jail use, community corrections, law enforcement and other preventive efforts, California counties have provided a comparable level of public safety to that previously achieved by state prisons. Nevertheless, sustaining these policy objectives will require greater attention to local implementation, targeted crime prevention, and sentencing reform.
This article reviews the current trends and impact of mass incarceration on communities of color, with a focus on criminal justice policy and practice contributors to racial disparity. The impact of these disproportionate incarceration rates on public safety, offenders, and communities are discussed. Recommendations for criminal justice and other policy reforms to reduce unwarranted racial disparities are offered.
Poor urban communities experience high rates of incarceration and prisoner reentry. This paper examines the residences where former prisoners live after prison, focusing on returns to pre-prison social environments, residential mobility, and the role of intermediate sanctions. Drawing on a unique dataset that follows a cohort of Michigan parolees released in 2003 over time using administrative records, we examine returns to pre-prison environments, both immediately after prison and in the months and years after release. We then investigate the role of intermediate sanctions - punishments for parole violations that are less severe than returning to prison - in residential mobility among parolees. Our results show low rates of return to former neighborhoods and high rates of residential mobility after prison, a significant portion of which is driven by intermediate sanctions resulting from criminal justice system supervision. These results suggest that, through parole supervision, the criminal justice system generates significant residential mobility.
Community supervision has been an integral part of cor-rections since the establishment of probation more than 100 years ago. It has commonly been assumed that offenders benefit from community supervision much more than if they were incarcerated. However, empiri-cal evidence in support of the effectiveness of community supervision in reducing recidivism questions this assumption. A detailed examination of audio taped interviews between 62 probation officers and their clients found relatively poor adherence to some of the basic principles of effec-tive intervention–the principles of Risk, Need and Responsivity. For the most part, probation officers spent too much time on the enforcement aspect of supervision (i.e., complying with the conditions of probation) and not enough time on the service delivery role of supervision. Major criminogenic needs such as antisocial attitudes and social supports for crime were largely ignored and probation officers evidenced few of the skills (e.g., prosocial modeling, differential reinforcement) that could influence behavioral change in their clients. As a snapshot of present practices, this study begins a path to a systematic and structured training agenda to help probation officers become more effective agents of change.
The Philadelphia Low-Intensity Community Supervision Experiment provides evidence on the effects of lowering the intensity
of community supervision with low-risk offenders in an urban, US county community corrections agency. Using a random forests
forecasting model for serious crime based on Berk et al. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, 172(Part 1), 191–211, 2009, 1,559 low-risk offenders were identified and randomly assigned to either standard or reduced frequency of mandatory office
visits. Treatment as assigned was substantially delivered at 4.5 probation visits per year versus 2.4, for as long as offenders
remained on active probation or parole. In a one-year follow-up for all cases, outcomes examined were the prevalence, frequency,
seriousness and time-to-failure of arrests for new crimes committed after random assignment was implemented. No significant
differences (p = .05) in outcomes were found between standard and low-intensity groups. Non-significant differences for offense seriousness
favored the low-intensity group. We conclude that lower-intensity supervision at the tested level of dosage can allow fewer
officers to supervise low-risk offenders in the community without evidence of increased volume or seriousness of crime.
KeywordsRisk assessment-Probation-Parole-Randomized experiment-Supervision intensity-Defiance theory-Specific deterrence-Deviant peer contagion
Research Summary
Our study represents the first effort to evaluate systematically Proposition 47's (Prop 47's) impact on California's crime rates. With a state‐level panel containing violent and property offenses from 1970 through 2015, we employ a synthetic control group design to approximate California's crime rates had Prop 47 not been enacted. Our findings suggest that Prop 47 had no effect on homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, or burglary. Larceny and motor vehicle thefts, however, seem to have increased moderately after Prop 47, but these results were both sensitive to alternative specifications of our synthetic control group and small enough that placebo testing cannot rule out spuriousness.
Policy Implications
As the United States engages in renewed debates regarding the scale and cost of its incarcerated population, California stands at the forefront of criminal justice reform. Although California reduced its prison population by 13,000 through Prop 47, critics argue anecdotally that the measure is responsible for recent crime upticks across the state. We find little empirical support for these claims. Thus, our findings suggest that California can downsize its prisons and jails without compromising public safety.
A substantial contributor to prison admissions is the return of individuals recently released from prison, which has come to be known as prison’s “revolving door.” However, it is unclear whether being sentenced to prison itself has a causal effect on the probability of a subsequent return to prison or on criminal behavior. To examine the causal effect of being sentenced to prison on subsequent offending and reimprisonment, we leverage a
natural experiment using the random assignment of judges with different propensities for sentencing offenders to prison. Drawing on data on all individuals sentenced for a felony in Michigan between 2003 and 2006, we compare individuals sentenced to prison to those sentenced to probation, taking into account sentence lengths and stratifying our analysis by race. Results show that being sentenced to prison rather than probation increases the probability of imprisonment in the first 3 years after release from prison by 18 percentage
points among nonwhites and 19 percentage points among whites. Further results show that such effects are driven primarily by imprisonment for technical violations of community supervision rather than new felony convictions. This suggests that more stringent post-prison parole supervision (relative to probation supervision)
increases imprisonment through the detection and punishment of low-level offending or violation behavior. Such behavior would not otherwise result in imprisonment for someone who had not already been to prison or who was not on parole. These results demonstrate that the revolving door of prison is in part an effect of the nature of post-prison supervision.
Although the labor market consequences of incarceration in prison have been central to
the literature on mass incarceration, punishment, and inequality, other components of the
growing criminal justice system have received less attention from sociologists. In particular, the
rise of mass incarceration was accompanied by an even larger increase in community
supervision. In this paper we examine the labor market effects of one frequently experienced
aspect of post-prison parole, short-term custody for parole violations. Although such sanctions
are viewed as an alternative to returning parole violators to prison, they have the potential to
affect labor market outcomes in ways similar to imprisonment, including both adverse and
positive effects on earnings. We estimate that parolees lost approximately 37 percent of their
earnings in quarters during which they were in short-term custody. Although their earnings
tended to increase in the quarter immediately following short-term custody – consistent with the
stated intentions of such sanctions – parolees experienced further earnings loss over the longer
term after such sanctions. In the third quarter following a short-term custody sanction, earnings
are lowered by about 13 percent. These associations are larger for those who were employed in
the formal labor market before their initial incarceration.
While many scholars and social commentators bemoan the rise of “mass incarceration” in the United States, few states have succeeded in significantly reducing prison populations. Fueled by systemic changes in penal codes, sentencing practices, and federal funding all designed to increase the use of imprisonment, most states have been unable to reverse the massive increase that has transpired over the past four decades. More alarming, there are few indications that mass incarceration will be reduced any time soon. There are a few exceptions, with California being one. Since 2007, California’s prison population has dropped by over 43,000 prisoners. Reductions have also been achieved in the state parole (82,000) and probation (15,000) populations. Today there are 146,000 fewer Californians in prison, jail, parole, or probation. Initially driven largely by a period of lengthy litigation, a rare federal court order to depopulate, several other reforms, reflecting a sticks and carrots approach, were introduced beginning in 2007 to lower imprisonment rates. Among them was “Realignment,” which relocated approximately 27,000 state prisoners to the counties. However, it required another stick in the form of a ballot initiative (Proposition 47) to further reduce the prison population and meet compliance with the federal court order. In the end, it was the externally imposed dual “sticks” of litigation and a ballot initiative that proved to be the driving forces in reducing California’s use of mass incarceration.
Over a century and a half ago, Boston reformer John Augustus launched the idea of the probation system. The author analyzes Augustus' own 1852 "Report of the Labors of John Augustus for the Last Ten Years, in Aid of the Unfortunate...," to locate the principles of selection and methods of supervision used by Augustus in his unpaid role of standing bail for and supervising the rehabilitation of certain offenders.
Imprisonment rates for black Americans have long been five to seven times higher than those for whites. The immediate causes are well known: high levels of black imprisonment resulting in part from higher black than white arrest rates for violent crime and vastly higher black drug arrest rates. Drug arrest disparities result from police decisions to concentrate attention on drugs blacks sell and places where they sell them. Prison disparities are aggravated by laws prescribing sentences of unprecedented severity for offenses for which blacks are disproportionately arrested. Those practices and policies were shaped by distinctive sociological, psychological, and political features of American race relations. Work on the psychology of American race relations shows that many white Americans resent efforts made to help black Americans overcome the legacy of racism; that stereotypes of black criminality support whites' attitudes toward drug and crime control policy; and that statistical discrimination, colorism, Afro-American feature bias, and implicit bias cause black offenders to be treated especially severely. Sociological work on racial stratification shows that whites support policies that maintain traditional racial hierarchies. Contemporary drug and crime control policies are components of the Republican Southern Strategy, shaped by and exacerbating those phenomena, to use crime as a "wedge issue" to appeal to whites' racial anxieties and resentments.
Although growth in the U.S. prison population over the past twenty-five years has been widely discussed, few studies examine changes in inequality in imprisonment. We study penal inequality by estimating lifetime risks of imprisonment for black and white men at different levels of education. Combining administrative, survey, and census data, we estimate that among men born between 1965 and 1969, 3 percent of whites and 20 percent of blacks had served time in prison by their early thirties. The risks of incarceration are highly stratified by education. Among black men born during this period, 30 percent of those without college education and nearly 60 percent of high school dropouts went to prison by 1999. The novel pervasiveness of imprisonment indicates the emergence of incarceration as a new stage in the life course of young low-skill black men.
What is the nature of the evidence provided by thought experiments in philosophy? For instance, what evidence is provided by the Gettier thought experiment against the JTB theory of knowledge? According to one view, it provides as evidence only a certain psychological proposition, e.g. that it seems to one that the subject in the Gettier case lacks knowledge. On an alternative, nonpsychological view, the Gettier thought experiment provides as evidence the nonpsychological proposition that the subject in the Gettier case lacks knowledge (e.g., Williamson 2007). Given the centrality of thought experiments to philosophical enquiry, the correct account of thought experiment evidence is important for understanding the nature of philosophical methodology. Further, Williamson argues that a misguided adherence to the psychological view of thought experiment evidence encourages scepticism about philosophy since it opens a gap between our evidence and the nonpsychological subject matter of philosophy. The main aim of this paper is to defend the psychological view against recent objections. In particular, I argue that even if thought experiment evidence is psychological, it can still provide justification for non‐psychological claims which are the subject matter of philosophy.
After four decades of steady growth, U.S. states' prison populations finally appear to be declining, driven by a range of sentencing and policy reforms. One of the most popular reform suggestions is to expand probation supervision in lieu of incarceration. However, the classic socio-legal literature suggests that expansions of probation instead widen the net of penal control and lead to higher incarceration rates. This article reconsiders probation in the era of mass incarceration, providing the first comprehensive evaluation of the role of probation in the build-up of the criminal justice system. The results suggest that probation was not the primary driver of mass incarceration in most states, nor is it likely to be a simple panacea to mass incarceration. Rather, probation serves both capacities, acting as an alternative and as a net-widener, to varying degrees across time and place. Moving beyond the question of diversion versus net widening, this article presents a new theoretical model of the probation-prison link that examines the mechanisms underlying this dynamic. Using regression models and case studies, I analyze how states can modify the relationship between probation and imprisonment by changing sentencing outcomes and the practices of probation supervision. When combined with other key efforts, reforms to probation can be part of the movement to reverse mass incarceration.
Community supervision, whether in the form of probation or post-release supervision, is ordinarily framed as an alternative to incarceration. For this reason, legal reformers intent on reducing America's disproportionately high incarceration rates often urge lawmakers to expand the use of community supervision, confident that diverting offenders to the community will significantly reduce over-reliance on incarceration. Yet, on any given day, a significant percentage of new prisoners arrive at the prison gates not as a result of sentencing for a new crime, but because they have been revoked from probation or parole. It is therefore fair to say that in many cases community supervision is not an alternative to imprisonment, but only a delayed form of it. This Article examines the reasons why community supervision so often fails, and challenges popular assumptions about the role community supervision should play in efforts to reduce over-reliance on imprisonment. While probation and post-release supervision serve important purposes in many cases, they are often imposed on the wrong people, and executed in ways that predictably lead to revocation. To decrease the overuse of imprisonment, sentencing and correctional practices should therefore limit, rather than expand, the use of community supervision in three important ways. First, terms of community supervision should be imposed in fewer cases, with alternatives ranging from fines to unconditional discharge to short jail terms imposed instead. Second, conditions of probation and post-release supervision should be imposed sparingly, and only when they directly correspond to a risk of re-offense. Finally, terms of community supervision should be limited in duration, extending only long enough to facilitate a period of structured re-integration after sentencing or following a term of incarceration.
Palmer's critique of "What Works?" is a strong defense of what was best in the California tradition of "recidivism only" research; it is also a stubborn refusal to take the step forward from that kind of thinking to the era of "social planning" re search.
The primary reason for the impact of "What Works?" is the extraordinary gap between the claims of success made by proponents of various treatments and the reality revealed by good research.
Palmer bases his critique on grounds of research methods. In doing so, he makes an interpretation error by construing as "studies" the "efforts" Martinson mentions in his conclusion. In fact, "effort" represents an independent variable category; this use of the term does not justify Palmer's statement that Martinson inaccurately described individual studies, whose results had been favorable or partially favorable, as being few and isolated exceptions. The table in which Palmer tabulates 48 per cent of the research studies as having at least partially positive results is meaningless; it includes findings from studies of "interventions" as dissimilar as probation placement and castration. Palmer does not understand the difficulties of summarizing a body of research findings. The problem lies in drawing together often conflicting findings from individual studies which differ in the degree of reliance that can be placed on their conclusions. It is essential to weigh the evi dence and not merely count the studies. The real conclusion of "What Works?" is that the addition of isolated treatment elements to a system in which a given flow of offenders has generated a gross rate of recidivism has very little effect in changing this rate of recidivism.
To continue the search for treatment that will reduce the recidivism rate of the "middle base expectancy" group or that will show differential effects for that group is to become trapped in a dead end. The essence of the new "social plan ning" epoch is a change in the dependent variable from recidivism to the crime rate (combined with cost). The public does not care whether a program will demonstrate that the experimental group shows a lower recidivism rate than a con trol group; rather, it wants to know whether the program re duced the overall crime rate. To ask "which methods work best for which types of offenders and under what conditions or in what types of settings" is to impose the narrowest of questions on the search for knowledge. The economists, too, do not live in Palmer's world of "types" of offenders. To them, recidivism is an aspect o f occupational choice strength ened by the atrophy of skills and opportunity for legitimate work that occurs during a stay in prison.
The aim of future research will be to create the knowledge needed to reduce crime. It must combine the analytical skills of the economist, the jurisprudence of the lawyer, the sociol ogy of the life span, and the analysis of systems. Traditional "evaluation" will play a modest but declining role.
Criminal justice reformers often speak of their concern with the widening net of the criminal justice system, but they demonstrate little understanding of this phenomenon. Despite considerable reform activity during the past two decades, the reach of the justice system has remained unchanged or even has been extended. This paper examines the dialectics of reform movements and their intended or unintended consequences in widening, strengthening, or creating different nets of social control.
Six major reform movements (diversion, decarceration, due process, decriminalization, deterrence, and just deserts) are reviewed to illustrate how organizational dynamics function to resist, distort, and frustrate the reform's original purposes. The authors also argue that potential reformers cannot ignore the surrounding social, political, economic, and ideological context. Reformers must recog nize that legal, programmatic, and administrative reforms are themselves circum scribed by political and economic forces. Future efforts at change must include detailed analyses of the larger political-economic structure and its interconnections with the social control apparatus if more substantive results are to be realized.
1. It is ironic that, on the issue of criminal justice, conservatives and liberals exchange their traditional positions with regard to fiscal policy. Conservatives advocate increasing state expenditures for police, courts, and prisons, while liberal reformers are likely to espouse the opposite position.
2. LEAA officials note that these figures are conservative estimates because of incomplete and inaccurate records of state LEAA grants. In addition, these figures do not include Department of Labor, National Institute of Drug Abuse, and Health, Education and Welfare grants awarded to promote diversion.
3. As used here, delinquent describes youths who commit acts that would be criminal if committed by adults.
4. Since numerous crimes are committed by staff and inmates within prison settings, crime is displaced by imprisonment but not prevented.
5. It did "materialize" for 1,132 offenders, who were sentenced to indeterminate "lifetime" prison terms between 1974 and 1975. It also materialized for New York's citizens, who paid a cost conservatively estimated as $55 million to implement the new law (Bar Association, 1976).
6. An important exception is Ehrlich (1975). However, his study has been criticized (as have Sellin's, Passell's, and others') for failing to control for relevant confounding variables.
7. Another reform similar to determinate sentencing is the development of parole guidelines. Each shares the common goal of reducing the discretionary power of judges and correctional officers.
8. Other factors that have contributed to prison overcrowding include increased arrest rates, worsening economic situation, demographic population shifts, and a more conservative political climate. Since almost all fifty state correctional systems are overcrowded, determinate sentencing cannot be considered the causal variable.
9. Sumner's position is revealed clearly in his essay, "The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over" (1894).
10. See Stanley Cohen (1979) for an illustration of how criminal justice reforms contribute to the nightmare of unfettered state control.
Recent correctional reforms have ameliorated the deprivations of prison and indirectly have caused states to toughen probation because many offenders must be diverted from incarceration to meet court-defined limits on prison crowding. These changes raise the possibility that offenders increasingly may view prison as easier or less punitive than probation. Using interview data from newly incarcerated Texas offenders, this analysis examines the extent to which offenders prefer incarceration when presented with choices between paired prison and probation sentences. Though a number of demographic and experiential variables are examined, multivariate analysis reveals that being African-American is the strongest predictor of a preference for prison. Implications of these results are discussed.
This report presents the final results of the evaluation of the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO). CEO is one of four sites in the Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ Demonstration and Evaluation Project, sponsored by the Administration for Children and Families and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), with additional funding from the U.S. Department of Labor. MDRC, a nonprofit, nonpartisan social and education policy research organization, is leading the evaluation, in collaboration with the Urban Institute and other partners.Based in New York City, CEO is a comprehensive employment program for former prisoners — a population confronting many obstacles to finding and maintaining work. CEO provides temporary, paid jobs and other services in an effort to improve participants’ labor market prospects and reduce the odds that they will return to prison. The study uses a rigorous random assignment design: it compares outcomes for individuals assigned to the program group, who were given access to CEO’s jobs and other services, with the outcomes for those assigned to the control group, who were offered basic job search assistance at CEO along with other services in the community.The three-year evaluation found that CEO substantially increased employment early in the follow-up period but that the effects faded over time. The initial increase in employment was due to the temporary jobs provided by the program. After the first year, employment and earnings were similar for both the program group and the control group.CEO significantly reduced recidivism, with the most promising impacts occurring among a subgroup of former prisoners who enrolled shortly after release from prison (the group that the program was designed to serve). Among the subgroup that enrolled within three months after release, program group members were less likely than their control group counterparts to be arrested, convicted of a new crime, and reincarcerated. The program’s impacts on these outcomes represent reductions in recidivism of 16 percent to 22 percent. In general, CEO’s impacts were stronger for those who were more disadvantaged or at higher risk of recidivism when they enrolled in the study.The evaluation includes a benefit-cost analysis, which shows that CEO’s financial benefits outweighed its costs under a wide range of assumptions. Financial benefits exceeded the costs for taxpayers, victims, and participants. The majority of CEO’s benefits were the result of reduced criminal justice system expenditures.
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