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5 Why Parole and Probation Policies Need to Change ALMOST EVERYONE WHO goes to prison comes out of prison. In fact, except for the 5% who are sentenced to life without parole, executed , or die of natural causes, 95% of all prison admissions are released , and 80% are released to parole or some kind of after-prison supervision.1 Yet the parole system is one of the most misunderstood components of the criminal justice system. This government function has garnered an almost pejorative connotation in the public’s eyes through high-profile crime cases centering on parolees and the national movement to abolish discretionary release on parole that captured media attention over the last decade. Ironically, though, a large segment of the public (and likely many journalists as well) do not know the distinction between probation and parole: that probation involves a sentence in lieu of prison, whereas parole involves community supervision once a portion of a prison sentence has been served. Exactly what parole officers do on a day-to-day basis, and how they decide to send well over a hundred thousand parolees back to prison each year for rule violations, tends to be a mundane “inside baseball” process that is sometimes misunderstood even by those within the criminal justice system. Nonetheless, this often overlooked part of the criminal justice system and the esoteric bureaucratic processes it employs can entail hundreds of millions, and probably billions, of dollars of expenditures on prison expansion. Especially in an era of fiscal crisis or restraint, these expenses force budget reductions in other parts of government, such as education, that have nothing to do with parole. Consequently, it is crucial to evaluate how parole has come to play this enormous role in maintaining a swollen U.S. prison system. Shining light on the “under the radar” operations of parole may assist in spurring the creation of alternative parole or community supervision policies that can meaningfully reduce prison spending while protecting public safety. 131 Virtually no one in government can spend money like a parole officer . While agency heads and commissioners have control over very large budgets, these budgets are tightly constrained by labor contracts, mandated expenses, support services, and by numbers and type of personnel . Should a commissioner wish to spend money on something discretionary over and above an agency’s budget, this almost always involves a nightmarish process of review by the executive branch and, often, legislative approval as well. Not so for the parole officer, who has no budget to control and may work in a cramped and overcrowded of- fice in a rundown building in a rundown part of town. He or she may have little or no access to programs or treatment for parolees and may earn much less than a correction or police officer. Adding insult to injury , the parole officer has no control over who or how many people have been put on that officer’s caseload. However, without any executive or legislative oversight or public understanding of how this happened, the decisions of a single parole officer can mean that a given state has to spend over a million dollars per year on prisons. In contrast, parole officers have no ability to compel parole agencies to spend additional funds on less expensive parole services such as drug treatment, job training programs, or additional officers to lower caseloads. Thus, taken together, parole officers’ decisions have had the effect of fueling the U.S. incarceration boom by sending many parolees back to prison who have not been convicted of any new crime but have broken one or more of the rules of conditions of parole. How did this situation that impacts so greatly on the U.S. prison system come to exist? Even more important, what can be done about it? To answer these questions, one needs to look at how the parole system has grown and changed over the last two decades, eventually becoming quite varied in its operations from state to state. Indeed, states have strikingly different cultural and political environments that affect their parole practices and, in turn, their respective rates of prison expansion. To argue for changing the parole system, too, requires explaining to law makers—many of whom are struggling with ongoing increases in public spending—precisely how political, fiscal, and even public safety benefits can accrue from using parole to quickly and effectively reduce the size and cost of...

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