NCJ Number
147784
Journal
ABA Journal Volume: 80 Dated: (April 1994) Pages: 62-66
Date Published
1994
Length
5 pages
Annotation
Faced with rising crime rates and declining revenues, governments are looking for new ways to sentence and rehabilitate offenders.
Abstract
Most of the 1.25 million inmates in the United States are in State prisons; the rest are in Federal prisons and city and county jails. At an average annual cost of $30,000 per inmate, prisons and jails cost $37.5 billion a year to operate. Alternative or intermediate sanctions represent one way of not increasing the prison population. Such alternatives include fines, community service, strictly supervised probation, electronic monitoring, and day reporting programs. These alternatives are cost-effective; electronic monitoring, for example, costs $75 per day versus $162 per day for jails. New York City operates several community-based programs, including the Center for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services (CASES) and the Court Employment Project (CEP). The CASES program handles more than half the city's participants in alternative programs, while the CEP enrolls nearly 1,000 participants a year.