Dear friends,
As states struggle to keep the public safe while also slowing the skyrocketing costs of prisons, they are looking closely at their probation and parole systems. They are examining who is placed on supervision, what parole officers' jobs should be, what caseload is appropriate, and what the consequences should be for violating the conditions of release.
The Urban Institute's report, Beyond the Prison Gates: The State of Parole in America, found that one-third of all people admitted to prison are admitted for a parole violation. This has grown from just 17% in 1980. In California, parole violators make up almost 70% of new admissions.
Governor Schwarzenegger appointed a panel of experts to review California's prison and parole policies. The Expert Panel issued an excellent report, Roadmap for Effective Offender Programming in California, with these recommendations:
Recommendation 1 - Reduce overcrowding in prison facilities.
Recommendation 2 - Enact legislation to expand positive reinforcements for offenders who complete rehabilitation programs and follow the rules. CDCR [California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation] must improve on matching offender needs with program objectives.
Recommendation 3 - Select and utilize a risk assessment tool to assess an offender's risk to reoffend. Risk assessments tools have been utilized for parolees, and should be expanded to assess all offenders.
Recommendation 4 - Determine offender rehabilitation programming based on the results of assessment tools that identify and measure risks and needs. CDCR should develop and utilize a risk-needs matrix to assign offenders to programming.
Recommendation 5 - Create and monitor a behavior management (or case) plan for each offender. Case plans are critical to assigning offenders to the right programs.
Recommendation 6 - Select and deliver a core set of programs for offenders that cover major offender areas. These include: academic, vocational and financial; alcohol and drugs; anger management; criminal thinking; family; and sex offenses.
Recommendation 7 - Develop systems and procedures to collect and utilize programming process and outcome measures. This will allow CDCR to determine the effectiveness of programs, reasons for outcomes, and ways to improve.
Recommendation 8 - Continue to develop and strengthen formal partnerships with community stakeholders. This will improve coordination of transition services for offenders moving from prison to their home communities.
Recommendation 9 - Modify community based programs to ensure they target the crime patterns of offenders, meet their basic needs upon return, and identify risk factors in their home community.
Recommendation 10 - Engage the community to help reduce the likelihood offenders will return to a life of crime. Critical thinking, positive relationships, and healthy behaviors are critical to offenders' success upon release.
Recommendation 11 - Develop structured guidelines to respond to technical parole violations, based on risk and seriousness. Sanctions and incentives are important tools.
While each state's system for parole is different, these recommendations can easily be adapted by legislative and corrections leaders to apply to their probation and parole practices.
Recommendation 11 is particularly important because many technical violations of probation and parole often result in a return to prison for people who have not committed a new crime and may be handling the transition from prison well. While we certainly want these people following the rules, sending them to prison without committing a new crime wipes out the progress that they have made reentering society.
When I was in the halfway house, a very nice man living there was working at the Sacramento Bee as a janitor. James's wages supported his wife and children and he was well on his way to a successful reentry. Because he had great difficulty with writing and arithmetic, he was late in turning in his reports to his probation officer three months in a row. One morning when he was at work, James was thrown over a desk, handcuffed, and dragged off to prison, costing him his job and leaving his family without his paycheck. James had not committed a new crime; he hadn't complied with the paperwork requirements of his parole. The decision to send him back to prison was a waste of taxpayers' money, and a tragedy for James and his family.
Shouldn't there have been some response short of a prison sentence that let him know that filing his reports was important? We need a system of graduated sanctions that tighten down on offenders that don't follow the rules without forfeiting the progress they have made. One judge summed up the situation well when he said, "Please give me more options. Right now I can send them to prison or let them go to the beach."
Professor James Q. Wilson has advocated policies that provide swift, certain and appropriate sanctions for offenses. As parents know, punishing a child immediately lets them know that what they have done is wrong. But waiting to mete out the punishment merely confuses the children.
Now, Judge Steven Alm, a former federal prosecutor, has put Wilson's policies to work in Hawaii, with remarkable success. Called Hawaii's Opportunity Probation with Enforcement, or H.O.P.E., the program enforces the rules of probation with immediate consequences. If offenders have a dirty UA, they are immediately taken to jail - but not for years, just 24 or 48 hours. If they have a paying job, their incarceration is postponed until the weekend - but there is not exception to serving it then. Drug treatment is provided for those who have difficulty staying clean.
The results so far are excellent. For the 745 defendants who have been in H.O.P.E. Probation for at least three months, their missed appointments rate has decreased by 80 percent and their positive drug test rate has dropped by 86 percent. For those offenders in H.O.P.E the longest, 42 months, the decrease is even larger: there have been 92 percent fewer missed appointments and 96 percent fewer positive drug tests.
These dramatic outcomes have been confirmed by independent study by researchers at U.C.L.A and Pepperdine sponsored by the Pew Center on the States. They found that H.O.P.E participants:
· Were three times less likely to be arrested than the comparison group of probationers.
· Were less than half as likely as members of the comparison group to test dirty for drugs or to miss probation appointments.
· Were revoked at a rate of just 9 percent versus 31 percent for the comparison group.
H.O.P.E. was recently highlighted in a Wall Street Journal article. And the best praise of all comes from the man whose theories underlie the program. Professor Wilson recently wrote, "This country imprisons too many people on drug charges with little observable effect. A better solution can be found in Hawaii, where a judge uses his powers to keep drug users in treatment programs (it's called Project Hope; look it up)." That pretty well sums up the current state of the war on drugs, and offers us hope (pardon the pun) that there is a better way.
Under a grant from the Public Safety Performance Project of the Pew Center on the States, Justice Fellowship will be working with government officials and community leaders in at least three states to establish new policies such as the H.O.P.E. program that are based on research and evidence of success. This new partnership with Pew is a true blessing for our work.
In His service,
Pat Nolan
Vice President, Prison Fellowship
Resources
Justice Fellowship Website
Public Safety Performance Project
Pew Center on the States
Beyond the Prison Gates: The State of Parole in America
Urban Institute 2002
Roadmap for Effective Offender Programming in California
CDCR Expert Panel on Adult Offender Reentry and Recidivism Reduction Programs
Hawaii’s Opportunity Probation with Enforcement
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