The Potential of Community Corrections to Reduce Mass Incarceration in the USA

2021 ◽  
pp. 145-161
Author(s):  
Marty Allen Hatfield
Keyword(s):  
Sex Offenders ◽  
Clinical Supervision ◽  
Mental Health Treatment ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Community Corrections ◽  
Alternative Form ◽  
Incarceration Rate ◽  
Ongoing Training ◽  
Determinate Sentencing ◽  
The Usa

Tough-on-crime policies and strategies, such as mandatory minimum and determinate sentencing laws and more severe punishments for juveniles, sex offenders, and drug offenders, have caused a substantial increase in the U.S. incarceration rate. Mass incarceration has generated several negative consequences, including racial bias and disparities, economic and social costs, and prison overcrowding. As such, the use of community corrections programs as an alternative form of sentencing has significantly increased. To effectively reduce crime and recidivism, community corrections programs must 1) utilize a validated risk and needs assessment when determining program placement; 2) provide participants with comprehensive, evidence-based services, including substance abuse and mental health treatment; 3) focus on modifying participants' behavior through treatment goal setting and the use of graduated incentives and sanctions; and 4) strive to hire and retain qualified staff, provide both initial and ongoing training, and monitor treatment staff with regular clinical supervision.

The Second Coming of Dignity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Simon
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Institutional Racism ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Legal Systems ◽  
Determinate Sentencing ◽  
Legal Commitments

In this chapter, Jonathan Simon argues that the modern criminal system should adopt the value of dignity as its governing ideal. The chapter argues that the legality principle—once a primary engine for strengthening the criminal system’s democratic legitimacy—has exhausted its sociological and jurisprudential power. Surveying 150 years of criminal legal commitments, this chapter shows how the legality principle rose to prominence as a vehicle for reform and accountability, and then fell under pressure from mass incarceration and institutional racism. Accordingly, the legality principle should be supplemented with a dignity principle, “an increasingly prominent value in legal systems internationally since the middle of the 20th century.” Simon traces the development of various forms of dignity in Supreme Court jurisprudence, from police procedure to prison conditions, determinate sentencing, and mental health. The chapter concludes that “the great banner reading ‘nulla poena sine lege’ must now be, not lowered, but joined by another banner of ‘no crime and no punishment without respect for human dignity.’”

scholarly journals The Penrose Effect and its acceleration by the war on drugs: a crisis of untranslated neuroscience and untreated addiction and mental illness

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory G. Grecco ◽  
R. Andrew Chambers
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Mental Health Treatment ◽  
Clinical Training ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
War On Drugs ◽  
Brain Diseases ◽  
Government Investment ◽  
Behavioral Healthcare ◽  
Penrose Effect

AbstractIn 1939, British psychiatrist Lionel Penrose described an inverse relationship between mental health treatment infrastructure and criminal incarcerations. This relationship, later termed the ‘Penrose Effect’, has proven remarkably predictive of modern trends which have manifested as reciprocal components, referred to as ‘deinstitutionalization’ and ‘mass incarceration’. In this review, we consider how a third dynamic—the criminalization of addiction via the ‘War on Drugs’, although unanticipated by Penrose, has likely amplified the Penrose Effect over the last 30 years, with devastating social, economic, and healthcare consequences. We discuss how synergy been the Penrose Effect and the War on Drugs has been mediated by, and reflects, a fundamental neurobiological connection between the brain diseases of mental illness and addiction. This neuroscience of dual diagnosis, also not anticipated by Penrose, is still not being adequately translated into improving clinical training, practice, or research, to treat patients across the mental illness-addictions comorbidity spectrum. This failure in translation, and the ongoing fragmentation and collapse of behavioral healthcare, has worsened the epidemic of untreated mental illness and addictions, while driving unsustainable government investment into mass incarceration and high-cost medical care that profits too exclusively on injuries and multi-organ diseases resulting from untreated addictions. Reversing the fragmentation and decline of behavioral healthcare with decisive action to co-integrate mental health and addiction training, care, and research—may be key to ending criminalization of mental illness and addiction, and refocusing the healthcare system on keeping the population healthy at the lowest possible cost.

Local Labor Market Inequality in the Age of Mass Incarceration

2020 ◽  
pp. 003464462096602
Author(s):  
Luke Petach ◽  
Anita Alves Pena
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Incarceration Rate ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Level Data ◽  
White Poverty

We contend that the rise of mass incarceration in the United States can be framed through the lens of stratification economics, which views race- and class-based discrimination as a rational attempt on behalf of privileged groups to preserve their relative status and the material benefits which that status confers. Using the first (to our knowledge) local-level data set on incarceration rates by race, we explore the relationship between income inequality, poverty, and incarceration at the commuting zone level from 1950 to the present. Consistent with Michelle Alexander’s hypothesis that expansion of the penal system and the rise of “tough on crime” policy were efforts by privileged groups to drive a wedge into working-class political coalitions formed out of the Civil Rights Movement, we find that labor markets with greater inequality experienced larger increases in the overall incarceration rate. Furthermore, we find that relative rates of poverty play a key role in explaining differential effects of mass incarceration across race. Areas where White poverty rates were large relative to non-White poverty rates experienced no significant change in White incarceration, but an expansion of non-White incarceration. These findings have implications for policies related to economic and judicial systems.

scholarly journals Management of adult sex offenders

1998 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josanne Holloway
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Sex Offenders ◽  
Sampling Methods ◽  
Sexual Assaults ◽  
Sexual Offences ◽  
Prevalence Studies ◽  
True Incidence ◽  
Male Offenders ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Adult Sex Offenders

The true incidence and prevalence of sexual abuse against children is difficult to ascertain. Differing sampling methods, definitions of sexual abuse and methods of information-gathering have a significant effect on the rates reported. General population studies (Morrison et al, 1994) in the USA and Europe reveal a rate between 0.7 and 1.83 per 1000 children. Data from prevalence studies (Morrison et al, 1994) highlight large differences, with rates varying from 7 to 62%; meanwhile, only between 2 and 17% of sexual assaults are reported to the police. Many of the reported offenders are not prosecuted because of difficulties with the child's statement. Some offenders are cautioned, others are charged with specimen charges or have their charges downgraded. Despite an increase in the reporting of sexual offences since the 1970s, they account for only approximately 3% of all offenders on probation and 8% of male offenders in prison even though the number and length of prison sentences for sex offenders has increased since the 1970s. Convicted female offenders remain a very small group with only 23 convicted female sex offenders in custody in 1989.

Probation in America: Armed, private and unaffordable?

2011 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 317-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Teague
Keyword(s):  
Prison Population ◽  
Community Corrections ◽  
The State ◽  
Probation Officers ◽  
Community Supervision ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Prison Industrial Complex ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Impact

While America is renowned for its enormous prison industrial complex, less academic attention has been paid to the state of probation intervention. The probation population has long been rising more swiftly than the prison population, and one in 45 adults in the USA is now subject to community supervision. This article explores the development of American probation and considers a series of key contextual issues, including the fragmented nature of the US probation system and the philosophies which underpin it, supervision fees, privatization, and the arming of probation officers, in order to illuminate how the community corrections system functions. The Justice Reinvestment initiative is also considered, and the impact of budgetary pressures upon probation is taken into account.

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