What Is Community-Based Correction - Essay Example

Rolanda Calloway Dr. Charles Mauney Directed Study BCJ 4355 28 November 2008 What Is Community-based Corrections, and is it Effective? Community Corrections offers community program alternatives to non violent offenders in an attempt to reduce the major problem of prison overcrowding. The use of these types of alternative sentencing has rapidly become a major role in many correctional systems. These alternatives may be presented to offenders at different levels of the criminal justice process and may include bail, probation or parole. This paper will focus on the general issues related to community corrections by providing a brief history of corrections, defining community corrections, discussing the economics related to community corrections and the effectiveness of community corrections. History of Corrections The earliest American prisons were patterned after the English gaols which served as temporary places of confinement. The English gaols began to mushroom in England as places of confinement where prostitutes and beggars were beaten as punishment. The conditions in these gaols called bridewells were such that more prisoners died of sickness than execution. In 1779, the concept of penitentiary, a place where prisoners were given the opportunity to repent, was introduced by the prison reformist John Howard (Carlson & Garrett 2007 pp 7-8). Colonist America, together with Australia, later on became a place where the English threw their convicts. After the American Revolution however, new penal systems, not patterned after the English, were introduced. In the 1600s, William Penn, for whom Pennsylvania was named after, introduced the Great Law, a penal code which abolished all forms of capital punishment except for murder and advocated incarceration, fines and hard labor instead of violent punishments. After his death however, the previous Anglican Code of violent penalties reemerged until another prison reformer in the person of Benjamin Rush surfaced in the late 1700s and advocated the reformist point of view. The first prison group, the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, was created (Carlson & Garrett 2007 p 8). The first prison in the US was located in Simsbury, Connecticut and was called Newgate which emphasized punishment and labor but numerous riots and other disturbances forced it to shut down. With the advent of the prison reform movement advocated by the Quakers, the Walnut Street Jail was established. The new penal system, called the Pennsylvania system, took a humanitarian approach to punishment where reforming the convict became the purpose of incarceration. Solitary confinement to induce prisoners to contemplate and stop contact with other prisoners characterized the system. There was segregation for women from men as well. Education, religious and health services were also introduced. However, problems that commonly beset prisons like overcrowding and time management forced a closure of the jail. Eventually, two other prison houses were established in Pennsylvania: the Western State Penitentiary and Eastern State Penitentiary (Carlson & Garrett 2007 p 8). The Pennsylvania system eventually lost popularity because of the cost it entailed as well as the fact that solitary confinement almost always resulted in the emotional breakdown of prisoners. The Auburn system took its place with the New York state prisons being the first to institute it. This system imposed solitary confinement at night but let out the prisoners during the day to work. Large factories were built into and inside the state prisons for the prisoners to work. Silence was strictly imposed all throughout. The system was characterized by strict discipline imposed on the prisoners without sparing corporeal punishment, like beatings and chains, if warranted (Carlson & Garrett 2007 p 9). In the 1800s, the Auburn system gradually faded due to the fact that strict discipline like silence were hard to impose together with the usual prison issues like mismanagement, overcrowding and spiraling costs. The reform purpose of prisons eventually became secondary and custodial concerns became the primary. In late 1800s however, leaders of the National Prison Association met to draw a draft of the ideal prison system. The outcome was the creation of reformatories where the young adult convicts were exposed to education and vocational training. With the influences of prison reformists like Alexander Maconochie, a Scotman, and Sir Walter Crofton, an Irishman, the new system imposed indeterminate sentencing, where the judge imposed an unspecified period of imprisonment but with a maximum, allowing the prison officials to determine the actual release of prisoners (Carlson & Garrett 2007 pp 10-11). In the 1900s, in the Industrial and Progressive eras, several prison systems became popular: the contract system; lease system; state-use system, and; public works and ways system. In all these systems, the prisoners were used to produce products for private businesses and the government but eventually, these activities had to be toned down as the labor sector cried unfair competition (Carlson & Garrett 2007 p 12). In 1930, the Bureau of Federal Prisons was created – a creation that impacted significantly on the prison system of the country. The agency instituted reforms in the prison system through new programs which were adopted by the different states – programs which made use of psychiatrists and psychologists, and made the prison system more humane for the prisoners (Carlson & Garrett 2007 p 12). After the Second World War, society began to look at prisoners from a different perspective – as victims. There was a move to humanize prison conditions and apply treatment used for soldiers traumatized in the war to prisoners. Also during the post-war period the medical model of prison system emerged, a system which has three components: diagnosis, evaluation and treatment. For the system to work, it was necessary to classify inmates and the fortress-like prison houses were done away with and in their stead, architectural designs which allow the incorporation of education, vocational training, health care, counseling and prison work industries. In 1946, the Manual of Suggested Standards for State Corrections was published and it served as the basic guideline to corrections operations and management (Carlson & Garrett 2007 p 14). In time however, the public grew weary of the medical system and branded it as “mollycoddling” and the return to punishment became imminent. Young adult prisoners, lawyers and other concerned people were questioning everything on constitutional grounds and the federal courts suddenly became visible. The chaos of the prison system in this period was capped by the Attica incident where prisoners took over the Attica prison and correctional officers were compelled to attack leaving twenty prisoners and ten correctional officers dead in its wake (Carlson & Garrett 2007 p 14). It was also in the 1960s to the 80s that the furlough system became popular with inmates temporarily let loose at certain times of the week to pursue community education or conjugal visits but the Willie Horton incident served as a catalyst for its end. Horton was an inmate who, while out on a furlough, brutalized a man and repeatedly raped the man’s woman companion. Since the subsequent fading of the medical system, the spate of violent crimes have made the public grown weary of kid-glove treatment of prisoners and have instead began clamoring for “get tough on crimes” stand (Carlson & Garrett 2007 p 15). It was also in this period that community-based correction programs were developed and implemented through private profit and non-profit agencies, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration and government agencies (Bowman, Hakim & Seidenstat 1993 p. 116). What is Community Corrections? Community corrections refer to that institution of punishment and management of offenders who are adults within a community’s jurisdiction and may include programs at the local, state or federal level. The term includes within its ambit services and programs in a non-secure environ although others consider jails to be a part of it (May, Minor, Ruddell & Matthews 2007 315). It includes house arrest, electronic monitoring, day reporting, halfway houses, and intensive supervision (Bartol & Bartol 2008 p 408). Community Corrections is an alternative way of dealing with offenders who are classified as non-violent and low-risk, chiefly as a means to deal with the usual problems besetting prisons like overcrowding and cost of maintenance. The term is so called because of the reliance on communities and others outside of the confines of prison houses to help with the rehabilitation of the offenders (Leighninger & Bradley 2006 p 129). The underpinning of community corrections is the for the offender to be reintegrated back into the community (O’Block, Donnermeyer, Doeren 1991 p. 423). In the 1960s and 70s, community corrections were built around the ideas of diversion, advocacy and reintegration. The casework model of community corrections allow presentencing investigations and intervene in the sentencing through recommendations. The assumption is that offenders can be changed and become model citizens. Although community corrections require offenders out on probation and parole to comply with certain rules and regulations, still surveillance and control are deemed not a part of community corrections but more on institutional corrections. The probationary officer acted as a counselor and aided the offender in the rehabilitation process, although he or she was also granted the authority to employ coercive means of imposing rehabilitation (Lawrence & Hemmens 2008 p 424). As previously stated there are three models of community corrections. The first model is diversion and this simply means the diversion of the offender from the normal process via the law enforcement, the courts and corrections to service in the community as a way of rehabilitating the offender. In some cases, services were not involved but with the threat of case revival against the offender hanging like the sword of Damocles hanging over his head in the event he repeats his violations. The subjects of diversionary community corrections were those which posed little risk to the community and which required minimal supervision (Lawrence & Hemmens 2008 p 425). The advocacy model, on the other hand, was devised to meet the need of the offender of a middleperson who will balance the power being wielded by the law enforcement agencies and the courts and a backer who will allow the offender access to the many community resources and employment opportunities. What the advocates wanted was to broaden opportunities for the offender in as many community programs as possible (Lawrence & Hemmens 2008 p 426). The reintegration model wanted to diminish the alienation of the offender from society and assimilates him/her back to its midst. The reintegration proponent saw the offender as the dropout or the “pushed out” or those who lacked education, job skills and credentials to land a job and worked for the offender’s reintegration through alternative education, vocational training. Programs in this model included halfway houses, work-release programs, study-release programs and the like (Lawrence & Hemmens 2008 p 426). The rehabilitation model of diversion, advocacy and reintegration however started to fade out for many reasons. One is the emergence of the justice model which emphasized more on the crime rather than on the criminal. Also, the efficacy of the rehabilitation in community corrections started to be questioned and a growing conservatism in America was palpable in the years that follow. The new slogan was “getting tough on crime” and every politician’s platform was to reduce criminality by advocating for tougher measures. In addition, many states started to impose the restitution model where criminals were made to pay, literally, for their crimes, the purpose of which is to ease off the growing overcrowding of prison houses without being branded as soft on criminals. Thus, the old models of diversion, advocacy and reintegration were discarded and in their lieu emerged the models of “just desserts,” where the sanctions of courts prevail, adversary as the probation officers now act as adversaries, instead of advocates, of the offenders and, restitution, instead of reintegration, where the emphasis is the collection of money from the offenders as payment for their crimes (Lawrence & Hemmens 2008 p 427). Economics Cost of Community Corrections. Oftentimes, states pass legislation to influence counties to share in the responsibility of rehabilitating offenders by taking them in into their own system. These legislations are usually called “Community Correction Acts” (CCA) where the states share in the cost of absorbing the offenders by the communities. So far, since 2004, the following states have passed their own version of the law: Minnesota, Iowa, Colorado, Oregon, New Mexico, Indiana, Ohio, Connecticut, Virginia, Texas, Tennessee, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Alabama and Florida. Each CCA of every state define their own methods of payment to the local government. Michigan, for example, before the passage of its CCA, paid the community programs directly but after the passage, began paying instead the local governments and allow the latter to deal with the community corrections (Guarino-Ghezzi & Loughran 2004 p. 76). Many believed however that the issue of incarceration should be beyond cost as its goal should be to remove the criminal element from society and therefore nothing should be spared to make the prison system a success (Freeman 1999 p. 395). Reduction of Prison Population. There is evidence to show that intermediate sanctions like community corrections have the effect of reducing prison population. A study, for example, made in four Kansas counties in 1999 showed that without the presence of community corrections as intermediate sanctions, the Kansas prison system would have been in much worse shape than it was then. However, a close scrutiny of the study would show that there are differences in the data in the four counties. In the two counties, the participants would have really landed in jails had the intermediary sanction not been imposed, but in the other two counties, the participants would not have been sentenced ultimately with imprisonment (MacKenzie & Armstrong 2004 p. 298). Widening the Net. The term “widening the net” is another way of saying widening the net of social control and simply refers to the fact that the presence of community programs as intermediate sanctions for offenders whose fate in the court is not yet certain at the time of its intervention, has the tendency to put more people under the control of the state or local government through the community programs when, had the intervention not occurred and the determination of the offender’s culpability been resolve to its end, there may be a possibility that the offender would not have been placed under the control of the penal system (Howard 1998). It was Stanley Cohen who coined the term “widening the net” or “thinning the mesh” after several studies conducted in Canada and the US showed that community corrections has the effect of increasing by three-fold the number of individuals under state control and that the system was so biased that many were less serious offenders were taken in its fold increasing the number of referral network more than necessary. This is because in the 1970s, it was the practice of the authorities to prevent the young adults from appearing in courts where there are pending cases against them to refrain them from being labeled and stigmatized and instead divert them to programs and other community services for rehabilitation (MacLaughlin & Munchie 2005 p. 262). Effectiveness of Community Corrections The best thing about community corrections is that they offer less social cost than incarceration because the offender, by skipping appearance in court, is spared from the stigma of labeling. In addition, the offender does not sever his ties with the family and the community since he does not leave it in the first place and therefore there is less effort at reintegration process. What is more important is that the offender is saved from being actually integrated into the prison system where he might be exposed and influenced by other criminalities (Caputo 2004 p 10). However, as there are proponents of the community correction systems, there are also opponents and this is because studies of the system show mixed results. There is, for example, the question as to whether the system is really effective in rehabilitating the offender. In addition, the managers of the programs will bear the added burden of controlling and the actual whereabouts of a large number of persons under the program (Phillips & McConnell 2005 p. 14). Conclusion The Community Corrections system grew primarily out of the need to ease off the overcrowding of the prison houses all over the country. While there are those who see merit in the system, there are also those who see it as an ineffective means of rehabilitating the offender and preventing recidivism. Indeed, it is evident that not all offenders, especially the young and the first time offenders, deserve to be place in the confines of jails where the environment may induce them to be swayed emotionally and psychologically towards hard criminalization and situate them further from rehabilitation. In addition, it is obvious that prison houses tend to be overcrowded and the expenses to maintain are soaring. Community corrections seem to be a satisfactory middle ground that would save the youth and the first timers from stigmatization and not shut the door completely in their faces in the future as well make reintegration back to society easier. On the other hand, there is indeed proof that the community corrections entail an unnecessary widening of the net of the social control by the government because there is a possibility that if cases are pursued in its natural course, the offender may not necessarily prison-bound ultimately. This implies more expenses that are unnecessary on the part of the state and the federal government. However, as between saving a young person’s future by sparing him from the stigma of the trial and the extra money put in by states as a result of the net widening, the former evidently, if the two opposing effects are placed on a scale, should have more weight. Besides, even the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals, the most positive move in effective corrections is the veering away from confining offenders in institutions and towards supervising them within the community (Kurz-Milke, Gigerenzer 2004 p 147). Works Cited Bartol, Curt R. & Anne M. Bartol. Introduction to Forensic Psychology: Research and Application. SAGE, 2008 Bowman, Gary W. & Hakim, Simon & Seidenstat, Paul. Privatizing Correctional Institutions Transaction Publishers, 1993 Caputo, Gail A. Intermediate Sanctions in Corrections. University of North Texas Press, 2004. Carlson, Peter M.& Garrett, Judith Simon. Prison and Jail Administration: Practice and Theory. Jones & Bartlett Publishers, 2007. Freeman, Robert M. Correctional Organization and Management: Public Policy Challenges, Behavior, and Structure. Elsevier, 1999. Guarino-Ghezzi, Susan, & Loughran, Edward J. Balancing Juvenile Justice: Second Edition. Transaction Publishers, 2004. Howard, John. Community Corrections. 1998. http://www.johnhoward.ab.ca/PUB/C29.htm#thecost Kurz-Milcke, Elke, Gigerenzer, Gerd. Experts in Science and Society. Springer, 2004. Lawrence, Richard & Hemmens, Craig. Juvenile Justice: A Text/Reader SAGE, 2008 Leighninger, Matthew & Bradley, Bill. The Next Form of Democracy: How Expert Rule is Giving Way to Shared Governance-- and why Politics Will Never be the Same. Vanderbilt University Press, 2006 May, David C. & Minor, Kevin I. & Ruddell, Rick & Matthews, Betsy A. Corrections and the Criminal Justice System. Jones & Bartlett Publishers, 2007 MacKenzie, Doris L. & Armstrong, Gaylene Styve. Correctional Boot Camps: Military Basic Training Or a Model for Corrections? SAGE, 2004. McLaughlin, Eugene & Muncie, John. The Sage Dictionary of Criminology. SAGE, 2005. OBlock, Robert L. & Donnermeyer, Joseph F., Doeren, Stephen E. Security and Crime Prevention. Butterworth-Heinemann, 1991 Phillips, Richard L. & McConnell, Charles R. The Effective Corrections Manager: Correctional Supervision for the Future. Jones & Bartlett Publishers, 2005 Read More