Early Release to Reduce Corrections Budgets

While both sides of the political aisle may wish to reduce funding within criminal justice, the early release of prisoners as a means of doing so usually appeals to only one side; who too often make criminal justice related decisions without a clear understanding of the danger of increasing the population of unreformed criminals—particularly from maximum security prisons—within communities.

Considering that the normal release strategy is currently rewarding us with a recidivism rate of 70%, the hope that early release may improve that is indeed hopeful.

In a new report from the Vera Institute, The Fiscal Crisis in Corrections: Rethinking Policies and Practices, a larger part of the rethinking revolves around early release of some form through an expanded use of community corrections.

My first salaried position within criminal justice was as a student research assistant on a federally funded program to create an evaluation instrument for community corrections programs and I spent as much of my time in the field visiting programs as in the office analyzing data.

What I gained from this experience was a great respect for evaluation but little hope that community corrections could play much of a role in criminal reformation and subsequent research results over the past 30 plus years since that initial experience have done little to change my opinion.

We’ve posted several times on the failure of current rehabilitative efforts and one informative post is here.