Corrections Probation Is a Form

Corrections

Probation is a form of punishment that courts can impose on person who has committed a crime instead of making them serve time in jail. A person sentenced to probation has some sort of sentence suspended on the condition that the person stay out of legal trouble, pay fines and restitution, do community service or fulfill other conditions set by the court. If the probationer violates the conditions of his probation, he can be brought back into court and have some or all the suspended sentence imposed (Boyd, 2010).

Probation as it is known today can be traced to the use of several judicial practices exercised in English and later, American courts. Release on recognizance or bail, allowed defendants who agreed to certain conditions of release to return to the community to await trial. Thus, similar to modern day probation, defendants were released to the community conditionally. If they failed to meet the condition of release, they were faced with the threat of revocation. And in some instances, they were spared further contact with the criminal justice system. In English courts, judicial reprieve empowered judges to temporarily suspend either the imposition or execution of a sentence in order to permit a defendant to appeal to the Crown for a pardon. During roughly the same time period, a shoemaker-philanthropist in Boston, named John Augustus, began the practice of bailing offenders out of court and assuming responsibility for them in the community. Regardless of whether the origins of probation are traced to judicial reprieve or to the work of John Augustus, it is clear that the guiding philosophy of probation was rehabilitation (Probation and Parole: History, Goals, and Decision-Making - Origins of Probation and Parole, 2010).

In spite of the widespread use of probation, parole, and other community sanctions there remains dispute over the effectiveness of many of these practices. The empirical evidence points to the fact that some correctional sanctions, such as intensive supervision, electronic monitoring, shock probation, and other control oriented practices do not work to reduce recidivism. These sanctions often achieve other goals, such as reducing prison crowding, but recidivism is usually the most important criteria that a community cares about in regards to correctional programs. Additional options, such as halfway houses and day reporting centers can be successful in changing offender behavior, provided that they have high quality treatment programs and services (Probation and Parole: Supervision - Effectiveness of Community Supervision, 2010).

Recidivism means re-offending. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 43% of federal felony probationers re-offend within three years of release. Research conducted in California in 1986 for the National Institute of Justice showed that over a 40-month period, 65% of felony probationers were rearrested (Boyd, 2010).

As reported in the publication Criminal Justice in the Media in July 2009, the state of Hawaii changed the message it sent out to probationers by starting a pilot program that lets probationers know upfront that if they fail to meet probation conditions, they will have a hearing within 48 hours, and will spend a few days in jail. Immediately, the number of probation violations dropped. The Municipality of Anchorage, Alaska imposed a similar program in 2000 for misdemeanor cases and also saw immediate positive results in probation completion and reduced recidivism (Boyd, 2010).

When probation was first used the idea was to try and give certain criminals a second chance to redeem themselves and prove that they could be law abiding citizens without having to spend time in jail. Over time it has become more of a way to deal with those criminals who have not committed very serious crimes. Due to the overcrowding of the jails that society is facing now there is simply no room for those people who have not committed a serious crime.

Jails have to preserve a safe and secure environment in order to protect their inmates, staff, visitors, and the community as a whole. In the past, a lot of jails have struggled to attain this, as demonstrated by the all too common occurrences of assault, suicide, fire, and escape. Traditionally, jails have sought to control inmates' solely through physical containment, namely, hardware such as locks, steel doors, security glass, and alarm systems. The safety of the staff was believed to depend on preserving physical barriers between staff and inmates (Hutchinson, Keller and Reid, 2009).