13 Strategies for Successful Supervision and Reentry

 In December, the Pew Center on the States released a new Public Safety Policy Brief called “Putting Public Safety First: 13 Strategies for Successful Supervision and Reentry.” The policy brief is the product of extensive research and discussions with national experts on community supervision. The information in the brief is critical to improving community safety because there are currently more than five million people in the U.S. who are either on probation or parole. Unfortunately, 40% of people on probation and over half of people on parole don’t successfully complete their terms of supervision. The goal of the report is to provide a series of recommendations that, if implemented together, will greatly improve the success of people on parole and probation.

We don’t have enough space here to list all of the suggestions, but a few of the recommendations include: holding community supervision offices more accountable for the success of people under supervision by making a decrease in recidivism a performance measure for those agencies; creating earned discharge programs so that people can earn their way off paper; using incentives and rewards when people are demonstrating success on supervision; and creating a range of sanctions, from community service to jail time, that can be quickly implemented when someone violates conditions of supervision.

Source: Pew Center on the States/The Urban Institute