Why parole is effective

A further The majority of parolees The level of violent offending on parole is also lower than previously thought. Only 7. Commenting on the findings, the director of the Bureau, said that they provided the first convincing evidence in Australia that parole is effective in reducing the risk of re-offending. Further enquiries: Dr Don Weatherburn Copies of the report: www. You may be trying to access this site from a secured browser on the server. But how about possession of a small amount of methamphetamine?

And, in fact, it will. In the not-so-good old days, parole agents had the power to return violators directly to prison without evidentiary hearings or defense lawyers. Court rulings — properly — rejected that process as a violation of even the limited rights of parolees. Reforms have helped drive down the proportion of California prison and jail inmates who are there because of technical probation and parole violations.

A careful review of laws and regulations that impose technical violations can help distinguish among those that should be kept on the books, those that should apply only in the narrowest circumstances and those that ought to be thrown out altogether.

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If the nation can learn to put these ideas into practice, it may be possible to drastically change the terms of the tradeoff between crime and punishment. This is among the conclusions of a National Research Council workshop report Parole, Desistance from Crime, and Community Integration , released in late Five years ago, the probation system in Honolulu was typical. Hawaiian probation officers were better trained than average, but like probation officers everywhere they found themselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume of rule breaking by probationers.

Probationers ordered to enter and remain in outpatient drug treatment programs complied with those orders only sporadically.

Such drug treatment problems are common nationwide. Diversion clients who fail to show up for treatment or who drop out before completing the prescribed course are very unlikely to face any sanction, even if the treatment provider reports nonattendance to the probation officer and the probationer officer in turn reports that to the sentencing court.

Here again, high violation rates and low sanctions rates, conditional on violation, are mutually reinforcing. The usual response to a missed appointment or a positive drug test was a warning. Only after a long series of violations would the probation officer admit defeat and spend the time to write up a motion to revoke probation, potentially but not, in practice, usually leading to the imposition of a prison term by the sentencing judge.

The threat of a possible sanction sometime in the indefinite future had little deterrent value. Still, a substantial number eventually accumulated sufficiently long records of noncompliance to lead to revocation. After long negotiations with the probation department, police, and jail administrators, Alm selected a few dozen probationers whose records of noncompliance put them at imminent risk of having their probations revoked.

To make it possible to carry out that threat, the probation department developed a fill-in-the-blanks violation-reporting form. Subsequent violations led to longer jail stays and eventually to a choice between long-term residential treatment and prison.

To induce probationers to appear for testing even when they expected to be found to have used drugs, the program provided for more severe sanctions for nonappearance than for testing dirty. To make that threat effective, Alm arranged with federal and local authorities to have officers available to promptly arrest those who failed to appear. Only rarely have probationers absconded, so the demand placed on the fugitive-tracking system has been modest. The warning hearings have proven strikingly effective.

Of probationers warned all chronic noncompliers , fewer than half were referred for an actual sanction, and most of those referred once and briefly jailed were never referred again. This happened despite the fact that the drug-testing regime for probationers subject to the new program was drastically tightened.

Instead of infrequent testing by advance appointment, HOPE probationers called a hotline every weekday to learn whether they were required to come in for testing that day. Initially, they were tested six times a month, with decreasing frequency offered as a reward for obeying the rules. That made it possible to assemble a comparison group of equally noncompliant probationers in other courtrooms—not exactly a true random selection, but a quite robust natural experiment. The HOPE pilot program has now been expanded to more than 1, probationers, about one-eighth of all felony probationers on Oahu, and to the calendars of all 10 felony judges.

So far, the results of the expanded program match the results of the pilot. A controlled trial with true random assignment between HOPE and business-as-usual probationers is currently under way. The shrinkage of illicit drug markets due to the removal of active customers is a bonus benefit. There also appear to be ways to make programs such as HOPE work even better.

In one important respect, HOPE does not comply with the principles of behavioral change discovered by psychologists: Its focus is entirely on punishment, whereas the literature makes it clear that reward often can be a more potent force in shaping conduct.

For example, researchers led by Stephen T. Whether the same would be true for probationers is not clear. Moreover, positive incentives may be hard to integrate into community corrections, if only for political reasons; the citizen outrage at a proposal to pay criminals to stop committing crimes is easy to imagine, even if it could be shown that doing so is a cost-effective means of crime control.

One possible way to deal with such political hurdles might be to cast rewards as remissions of previously assessed fines. Main navigation What is parole? Sentencing and parole Purpose and benefits How parole is managed Parole and community safety History of parole and the Board Post sentence supervision and detention.

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Annual Reports Parole Manual 'Parole, you decide' - mock parole hearing Chair explains who the members are Informative videos Learn about the parole process Prisoners should prepare for parole Welcome from the Chairperson. Breadcrumb Adult Parole Board What is parole? Purpose and benefits.