Executive Session on Community Corrections

Jurisdictions across the U.S. are engaging in efforts to reform sentencing and corrections policies, with an aim of shrinking the footprint of the criminal justice system. As these reforms unfold, the makeup of correctional populations is shifting, both for facilities and for probation and parole agencies. 

This calls for the development of new indices that provide an overall picture of the risk profile of people in prison and under community corrections supervision. 

These measures will help policymakers and the public understand whether criminal justice reforms are working as intended, specifically whether prisons increasingly hold people who have been convicted of serious, violent offenses and have extensive criminal histories and whether reentry and related policies and programs are reducing recidivism.

In this new report, the authors discuss that when stakeholders in Camden, New Jersey integrated health care and criminal justice data, they found that a small number of Camden residents disproportionately use the health care and criminal justice sectors. Ultimately, integrated data can lead to better individual outcomes, reduced crime and system cycling, and increased efficiency by directing resources to where they will have the most impact.

The authors discovered the following generalizable lessons from their work in Camden, New Jersey:

1. Data integration provides a new and more holistic lens through which to view and improve individuals’ lives.
2. The individuals who have an extremely high number of contacts with both hospitals and the criminal justice system exhibit significant variation in their experiences and behaviors.
3. Only breaking down data silos among agencies that serve vulnerable populations can we begin to address the root causes of behavior and prevent individuals from cycling through multiple systems.

The authors ask us to reconsider using recidivism as the defining measure of community corrections. Measuring the success of community corrections by recidivism, mainly, limits the mission to one of law enforcement, which relieves agencies of their responsibility for other outcomes such as employment, education and housing. Recidivism rates have long been a hallmark of defining success or failure in the criminal justice system, but it has its limitations.

The criminal justice sector is increasingly aware that recidivism is insufficient for measuring the effectiveness of community corrections interventions on individuals or for assessing community well-being. As an outcome indicator, recidivism is subject to at least three significant limitations:

1. Recidivism is a reflection of both the individual but also the justice system.
2. Recidivism reflects and compounds the racial disparities of the system.
3. Recidivism is too simple of a measurement for a complex process of desistance.

In this paper, the authors discuss the consequences of the tremendous growth in probation supervision over the past several decades in the United States and argue that the number of people on probation supervision needs to be significantly downsized.

The authors find that probation has often not served as an alternative to incarceration, but rather as a key driver of mass incarceration in the United States. Despite the large numbers of individuals under supervision, probation is the most underfunded of agencies within the criminal justice system. This leaves those under supervision, often an impoverished population, with the responsibility of paying for probation supervision fees, court costs, urinalysis tests, and electronic monitoring fees among a plethora of other fines. These financial obligations have incredibly detrimental implications on the mental and economic state of those under supervision and is argued to be an unjust and ineffective public policy.

 Executive Session members first lay out a series of principles that form the mission of community corrections – First, to promote the well-being and safety of communities; Second, to use the capacity to arrest, discipline, and incarcerate parsimoniously; Third, to recognize the worth of justice-involved individuals; and Fourth, to promote the rule of law, respecting the human dignity of people under supervision and treating them as citizens in a democratic society.

In order to fulfill that mission, the Executive Session members propose thirteen necessary paradigm shifts. The field of community corrections, they argue, must move:

• From punishing failure to promoting success;
• From mass supervision to focused supervision;
• From time-based to goal-based;
• From deficit-based to strengths-based;
• From delayed/arbitrary to swift/certain;
• From a focus on individuals who committed crimes to one focused on the victims;
• From individual-focused to family-inclusive;
• From isolated to integrated;
• From fortress to community-based;
• From low-profile to high-profile;
• From caseload-driven funding to performance-based funding;
• From “gut-based” to evidence-based;
• From low-tech to high-tech.