| Chapter 15
Covering Community Corrections: Probation, Parole and Beyond
By Jenifer Warren
Introduction
When most people think about corrections in America, they picture high-security prisons encircled with electric fencing, or jails teeming with inmates watched by uniformed guards. At last count, the nation housed 2.3 million people in its sprawling network of federal, state and local lock-ups. That means 1 in 100 adults is behind bars, an incarceration rate vastly exceeding that of any other country, the Public Safety Performance Project of the Pew Center on the States reported in 2008.
Such statistics are startling. But a far greater number of supervised offenders— more than two-thirds—are not behind bars. Instead, they live among the rest of us in the community, either on parole, probation, house arrest or under some other form of correctional watch. During the past quarter century, the number of offenders under correctional supervision in the community has skyrocketed, and now totals a staggering 5.1 million.
All the attention paid to long sentences like “three strikes and you’re out” life terms have masked the reality that most inmates serve relatively short stints in custody; the average length of stay was about 2 ½ years as of 2003, said a U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics report in 2007. That means that more than 700,000 people are released each year, many of them into the strained community supervision system.
Despite such high numbers, the vast array of programs and neighborhood-based sanctions collectively described as “community corrections” has received comparatively little coverage by the news media.
With federal and state budgets badly strained by the reeling economy starting in 2008, lawmakers are scrambling to cut correctional costs that ballooned during a two-decade build-up of the incarcerated population. Their quest is putting a new focus on community corrections, an alternative that costs dramatically less than housing offenders under 24-hour guard behind bars.
On average, prisons cost state governments about $79 per inmate, per day—or $29,000 per year. In contrast, supervising offenders on probation runs as low as $1.38 per day in Mississippi. Parole supervision costs a bit more, but still tops out at only $13.28 per day in Colorado, statistics collected by the Pew Center on the States for a 2009 report on probation and parole show. Layering drug treatment, job training or electronic monitoring on top of such supervision increases the cost, but not so high as the price of round-the-clock incarceration. Moreover, offenders in many states are now required to pay a portion of their community supervision costs, as well as paying restitution to victims.
For journalists, the expanding interest in community supervision creates an opportunity to explore a corner of the correctional world that has been overshadowed—even neglected—for years. So far, much of the coverage has focused on ex-convicts who committed serious crimes while on probation or parole, or the released sex offender who stirred an uproar by moving into a peaceful residential neighborhood.
Crimes by those under supervision is a legitimate subject for coverage, but reporters have devoted surprisingly little sustained attention to the management of the millions of offenders who ride our buses, shop in our grocery stores, walk our park trails, and live right in our midst. Even less journalistic effort has been invested in assessing the effectiveness of community corrections programs and the science that underlies them.
Simply defined, community corrections refers to a range of alternative punishments for offenders, often those convicted of property and drug offenses.
The centerpiece of supervision is probation and parole. But also under the community corrections umbrella are drug courts and residential drug treatment facilities, home detention with electronic monitoring, day reporting centers and other options. In some instances, programs are used on the “front-end” of the criminal justice system – to divert convicts away from prison or jail onto probation and into a community-based setting offering rehabilitation services.
In other cases, judges use halfway houses or other facilities as a “back-end” or post-custody alternative for parolees who need assistance, treatment or extra monitoring upon release from prison.
In recent years, community corrections options have proliferated dramatically, especially since prison overcrowding starting in the late 1980s spurred new interest in alternative sanctions. While the number of offenders under correctional watch in the community has soared, sufficient funding has rarely followed. The result: probation and parole agencies often lack the resources they need to monitor convicts effectively, let alone ensure they receive quality drug treatment, mental health care, job training or other services to reduce the odds they will reoffend.
On March 12, 1999, University of Pennsylvania political scientist John J. DiIulio summed up the state of affairs this way when he wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “Currently we spend next to nothing on community corrections. We get what we pay for.”
More than a decade later, not much has changed.
The new economic pressures ravaging state and local governments are only exacerbating this reality, creating a wealth of potential stories for reporters on the changing correctional landscape. Journalists also can find a bonanza of stories in the emergence of “techno-corrections”—the brave new world of devices and techniques that allow ever more intensive surveillance of offenders. From ignition interlocks to sophisticated, real-time GPS satellite monitoring, government has an expanding box of tools to track paroled sex offenders, gang members and others on the streets.
The advancing science of risk assessment—or determining whether an offender’s characteristics and history make him or her suitable for community supervision and, if so, what sort of programs best fit the needs—is also a natural target for investigation by the press.
Corrections agencies love to toss out figures showing how a pet program reduces recidivism, claims that often coincide with requests for additional funding from the Legislature. Journalists should beware of such reports, and never take them at face value. What do the data really say? Did the study include a control group? And how strong is the science behind it? Experts say that any program that claims to have reduced recidivism by more than 10 to 15 percent is suspect. Community corrections is an evolving and expanding field that is ripe for scrutiny by industrious journalists. And when it comes to public safety, no other piece of the nation’s byzantine correctional system matters more.
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