NCJ Number
195732
Date Published
July 1995
Length
276 pages
Annotation
This report explores trends and issues in Community Corrections
Acts (CCAs) in the United States, which are statutes that
provide administrative structures and State funding to localities
in order to involve citizens, criminal justice officials, and
other human services representatives in planning and delivering
improved community correctional services at the local level.
Abstract
In the early 1970's, policymakers in Minnesota, Iowa, and
Colorado adopted CCAs that were to serve as models for many
aspects of community corrections programming and financing in the
following years. Although the statutes adopted were different in
many ways, each was intended to encourage and provide State
funding for the support of citizens and local units of
governments in planning, developing, and administering
correctional programs at the local level. Two decades later,
almost half of the States have adopted laws patterned after these
early CCAs, and legislators in several other States are
considering following suit. In tracing trends in CCAs over a
period of more than 20 years, this report provides a basis for
identifying the defining features that allow a statute to be
classified as a CCA. It also identifies major differences among
such acts. The review of defining features and points of
divergence in turn allows the construction of a small number of
CCA models and the development of a series of charts that depict
major variations in key dimensions of CCAs. CCAs reflect a
variety of explicit and implicit goals, focus on different types
of offenders, involve a wide variety of types of administrative
agencies, and use a number of different funding schemes. They
also differ in how they define community corrections and in how
they conceptualize and give meaning in practice to the role of
the community in CCAs. These differences are reflected in
varying degrees of centralization and decentralization of
correctional services, different modes of citizen participation,
diverse approaches to deinstitutionalization or prison population reduction, and varying levels of emphasis on rehabilitation in the community. Each of these dimensions of difference is discussed in this report, and the differences are categorized in order to assist the field in developing some common language and understanding. This helps officials to understand the choices available to them in adopting or refining a CCA. 18 figures, a listing of CCAs by State, and 255 references
Date Published: July 1, 1995