Between Prison and a Hard Place: Public Confidence in Community Supervision and the Future of the Prison Crisis

• NCJ Number: 172670
• Journal: Corrections Management Quarterly Volume: 2 Issue: 3 Dated: Summer 1998 Pages: 1-11
• Author(s): J Simon
• Date Published: 1998
• Length: 11 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

Changes in community supervision policies and practices have had a significant role in the increase in the prison population and indicate the need for community supervision managers to develop innovative managerial techniques and to help shape a new public narrative of how supervision in the community can achieve security without imprisonment.

Abstract

Since 1980, more and more community supervision violators have been incarcerated. Some violators are committing serious crimes that would deserve imprisonment regardless of the offender's status. However, a substantial number, including many drug use and possession offenders, minor property offenders, and those who violate only a technical condition of parole or probation, are going to prison for conduct that would not lead to incarceration through the front door of the court system. Important shifts have occurred over the last two decades in the incentives facing community supervision agents. These shifts have led to an increasing reliance on incarceration. Community supervision managers have a double challenge in responding. First, they must develop innovative managerial techniques to balance staff incentives to use prison resources. Second, and far harder, they must provide a convincing account of how improved managerial capacity can itself provide better public security. Elements of the new narrative already exist; these include increasingly sophisticated methods of classification and the opportunities that information technology provides to allow decentralized decisionmakers in the community to note and respond to crime trends. Responding to both of the challenges is crucial, because the California experience suggests that administrative reform alone is unlikely to break the reflexive pattern of correctional populations cycling from supervised release to prison and back. Figure and 16 reference notes (Author abstract modified)