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| Solano County Prison SACRAMENTO, CA—After spending 4 years behind bars at a cost to the state (and taxpayers) of over $30,000 a year, Francois Williams was released on parole from California's Solano County Prison with no money, no job skills, and not much in terms of prospects. Although on the surface he seems like a nice person, intelligent and polite, he is the person you worry about when you leave town on vacation; he is the reason you lock your doors at night. In fact, Francois Williams is the guy who has made gated communities and home alarm systems so popular. As a habitual criminal with a drug problem who has spent a significant part of his life in and out of courtrooms and institutions, Williams's prospects for recovery were dismal as he left the prison gates in a taxi back to Sacramento. Before too long, he was back on drugs, failed to meet his parole obligations, got himself arrested for a new crime, and ended up being returned to prison.1 In retrospect, was paroling Francois the right thing to do? Who makes parole decisions, and on what criteria? And for that matter, what is parole and what happens when someone is on parole? How is it different from probation? Are there other forms of community-based corrections? What purposes do they serve? The principle of community-based correction rests on the fundamental fact that offenders either are incarcerated or are not. Logically, therefore, the concept refers to all correctional strategies that take place within the community. Accordingly, many types of court-determined sentences could be viewed as community-based correction. Some sanctions of the colonial era—such as the stocks and pillory, the ducking stool, the brank, and the scarlet letter—were certainly community-based. The same might be said of floggings in the public square and the imposition of fines in lieu of imprisonment. But these are oversimplifications of the community-based correctional philosophy, for other factors besides sanction and location are involved. Community-based correction includes activities and programs within the community that have effective ties with the local environment. These are generally of a rehabilitative rather than a punitive nature and can include arrangements with employment, educational, social, and clinical service delivery systems. Many also involve supervision by a community or governmental agency. Within this context, the more typical forms of community-based correctional services include pretrial diversion projects; probation and parole; education and work-release activities; and furlough, restitution, and halfway house programs. Certain types of community-based correctional services, such as diversion programs and probation, are sometimes referred to as intermediate sanctions—sanctions falling between the extremes of fines and imprisonment. The reasons for community-based correctional strategies encompass a range of humanitarian, fiscal, and pragmatic motives. First, along with the growth of the humanitarian movement in corrections, the notions of mercy and compassion, combined with considerations of human dignity, began to infiltrate sentencing practices and correctional decision making. For offenders who cannot help themselves, and for others who represent diminished risks to society, it is felt that custodial coercion might be unnecessary. Second, for an untold number of lesser and situational offenders, many reformers hold that the unfavorable consequences of imprisonment—loss of liberty and self-esteem, placement in physical jeopardy, and the fact that penitentiaries can be "schools of crime"—impede successful rehabilitation and community reintegration. Third, from an economic point of view, it generally costs far less to supervise criminals in the community than to maintain them in institutions. Moreover, the families of inmates often become financial burdens to the state. Fourth, many community-based correctional strategies have the practical value of helping offenders play productive roles in their neighborhoods and communities, as opposed to the more negative implications of imprisonment. Fifth, given the current trends in prison overcrowding, reducing or altogether eliminating the offender's period of confinement has been viewed as a more pragmatic approach to the management and control of the less seriously involved criminal offenders. And sixth, since the beginning of the 1960s, a "last resort" philosophy has developed in corrections. In this view, the traditional avenues of punishment and correction have not been working, and new, innovative approaches must be tested. 1. Sacramento Bee, November 28, 2004, A1; Sacramento Bee, November 29, 2004, A1. |