Community Supervision Cheaper, More Effective than Prison

A new national report, “1 in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections,” published by The Pew Center on the States Public Safety Performance Project, shows that strong community supervision programs not only cost significantly less than incarceration, when they are appropriately resourced and managed, they can also cut crime and recidivism by as much as 30%. The report also recommends policy reforms for states and counties that Oregon is implementing now, and suggests expanding community supervision instead of prison.

According to the study, states can cut both crime and spending by reallocating criminal justice system expenses to fund stronger correctional supervision in the community. Diverting people to community supervision programs also frees up the prison beds needed to house those convicted of violent offenses, and can offer budget makers additional resources for other pressing public priorities.

“Most states are facing serious budget deficits,” said Susan Urahn, managing director of the Pew Center on the States. “Every single one of them should be making smart investments in community corrections that will help them cut costs and improve outcomes.”

The study found that, in Oregon, for every dollar the state spent on prisons in 2008, it spent 27 cents on probation and parole. The ratio of costs for one day of prison in Oregon was equal to 7 days of parole or 11 days of probation. The study shows Oregon’s spending on prisons has far outpaced spending on probation and parole.

The report profiles a number of states that have engaged in safe and sensible sentencing reform, including everything from ending the use of mandatory minimum sentences, to diverting prison spending to drug treatment and ways to rehabilitate people in the community.

“You’re seeing bipartisan coalitions of lawmakers in states all across this country say getting tough on criminals has gotten too tough on taxpayers, and it’s not giving us the return in terms of public safety that we’d like to see,” said Adam Gelb, the study’s author, in an interview on National Public Radio. “And you are seeing in places like Texas, Kansas, Arizona and Pennsylvania – these groups of lawmakers coming together and finding a path to public safety that does not involve so much taxpayer spending. And that does involve releasing inmates from prison using carefully selected risk assessment tools and making sure that they’re releasing lowest-risk inmates from prison.”

“New community supervision strategies and technologies need to be strengthened and expanded, not scaled back,” continued Gelb. “Cutting them may appear to save a few dollars, but it doesn’t. It will fuel the cycle of more crime, more victims, more arrests, more prosecutions, and still more imprisonment.”

Many of Pew’s recommendations to states and counties are being enacted by Oregon’s community corrections departments. Pew’s recommendations include:

• Sorting “offenders” by risk to public safety to determine appropriate levels of supervision;
• Basing intervention programs on sound research about what works to reduce recidivism;
• Harnessing advances in supervision technology such as electronic monitoring;
• Imposing swift and certain sanctions for people who break the rules of their release but who do not commit new crimes; and
• Creating incentives for “offenders” and supervision agencies to succeed, and monitoring their performance.

(Note: PSJ prefers to put the humanity of individuals first and avoid labels; therefore, wherever “offender” is used we have put it in quotation marks.)

In Multnomah County, the Department of Community Justice — the county agency responsible for probation and parole — has implemented better tools to sort services, supervision and treatment for people under community supervision. DCJ’s Effective Sanctioning Practices have increased reliance on community-based sanctions, such as Community Service, Electronic Monitoring and Day Reporting.

“Lower-risk offenders can be put in programs like that in Multnomah County and elsewhere, where there’s a combination of strict supervision and evidence-based services that can do a pretty darn good job of stopping the revolving door,” says Gelb.

Information for this article was obtained from NPR’s Talk of the Nation and Pew Charitable Trust’s Center on the States.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Justice Matters.