Are Supervision Violations Filling Prisons? The Role of Probation, Parole, and New Offenses in Driving Mass Incarceration.

Advocates for reform have highlighted violations of probation and parole conditions as a key driver of mass incarceration. As a 2019 Council of State Governments report declared, supervision violations are "filling prisons and burdening budgets." Yet few scholarly accounts estimate the precise role of technical violations in fueling prison populations during the prison boom. Using national surveys of state prison populations from 1979 to 2016, the authors document that most incarcerated persons are behind bars for new sentences. On average, just one in eight people in state prisons on any given day has been locked up for a technical violation of community supervision alone. Thus, strategies to substantially reduce prison populations must look to new criminal offenses and sentence length.

Beyond "pains" and "gains": untangling the health consequences of probation.

BACKGROUND: Research on the health consequences of criminal legal system contact has increasingly looked beyond imprisonment to understand how more routine forms of surveillance and punishment shape wellbeing. One of these sites is probation, the largest form of supervision in the U.S. Drawing on an interview study with 162 adults on probation in Hennepin County, MN, in 2019, we map how adults on probation understand the consequences of supervision for their health and how these self-reported health changes correlate with individual, social, and structural circumstances. RESULTS: Roughly half of participants described their health as having improved since starting probation, while the remainder were split between no change and worsened health. Examining both closed-ended survey questions and open-ended interview prompts, we find that the "gains" of supervision were correlated with substance use treatment (often mandated), reduced drug and alcohol use, increased housing and food security, and perceptions of support from their probation officer. However, these potentially health-promoting mechanisms were attenuated for many participants by the significant "pains" of supervision, including the threat of revocation, which sometimes impacted mental health. In addition, participants in the most precarious circumstances were often unable to meet the demands of supervision, resulting in further punishment. CONCLUSIONS: Moving beyond the "pains" and "gains" framework, we argue that this analysis provides empirical evidence for the importance of moving social services outside of punishing criminal legal system interventions. People with criminal legal contact often come from deeply marginalized socio-economic contexts and are then expected to meet the rigorous demands of supervision with little state aid for redressing structural barriers. Access to essential services, including healthcare, food, and housing, without the threat of further criminal legal sanctions, can better prevent and respond to many of the behaviors that are currently criminalized in the U.S. legal system, including substance use.

Physical Health and Disability Among U.S. Adults Recently on Community Supervision.

Estimates of chronic conditions and disability among individuals on community supervision in the United States are lacking. We used 2015-2016 data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (N = 78,761) to examine the prevalence of chronic conditions and disability among nonelderly adults who had been on probation or parole in the past year, compared to adults without community supervision in the past year. The weighted sample was representative of 4,594,412 adults on community supervision and 191,156,710 adults without community supervision in the past year. Compared to the general population, adults recently on community supervision were significantly more likely to report fair or poor health, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, hepatitis B or C, one or more chronic conditions, and any disability. Collaboration between health and criminal justice systems is needed to accommodate the health needs and supervision requirements for individuals with community supervision.

Discourses of Mass Probation: From Managing Risk to Ending Human Warehousing in Michigan.

Over the past decade, some Western countries have begun to re-embrace the language of rehabilitation and calls for penal moderation. Risk logics-which undergirded the rise of mass incarceration in the U.S.-are now being repurposed to call for decarceration. Yet while risk played a key role in the transformation from modern to post-modern punishment, its development remains poorly understood. This article explores the discourses and practices of risk from the 1970s through to 2014 in one U.S. state (Michigan). The analyses focus on probation, the primary alternative to prison. The results show that risk discourses and practices emerged in the 1970s as a mode of resistance to the prison boom and have been adapted in each subsequent decade to address state governing crises.

Fracturing the Penal State: State Actors and the Role of Conflict in Penal Change.

The concept of a penal or carceral state has quickly become a staple in punishment and criminal justice literature. However, the concept, which suffers from a proliferation of meanings and is frequently undefined, gives readers the impression that there is a single, unified, and actor-less state responsible for punishment. This contradicts the thrust of recent punishment literature, which emphasizes fragmentation, variegation, and constant conflict across the actors and institutions that shape penal policy and practice. Using a case study of late-century Michigan, this paper develops an analytical approach that fractures the penal state, demonstrating that, far from a unified entity, it is a messy, often conflicted amalgamation of the various branches and actors in charge of punishment and the ways they resist the aims and policies sought by their fellow state actors. Ultimately, we argue that fracture is itself a variable that scholars must measure empirically and incorporate into their accounts of penal change.

Mass probation: Toward a more robust theory of state variation in punishment.

Scholarship on the expansion of the U.S. carceral state has primarily focused on imprisonment rates. Yet the majority of adults under formal criminal justice control are on probation, an "alternative" form of supervision. This article develops the concept of mass probation and builds a typology of state control regimes that theorizes both the scale and type of punishment states employ. Drawing on Bureau of Justice Statistics data from 1980 and 2010, I analyze whether mass probation developed in the same places, affecting the same demographic groups and driven by the same criminal justice trends, as mass imprisonment. The results show that mass probation was a unique state development, expanding in unusual places like Minnesota and Washington. The conclusions argue for a reimagining of the causes and consequences of the carceral state to incorporate the expansion of probation.

The Paradox of Probation: Community Supervision in the Age of Mass Incarceration.

After four decades of steady growth, U.S. states' prison populations finally appear to be declining, driven by a range of sentencing and policy reforms. One of the most popular reform suggestions is to expand probation supervision in lieu of incarceration. However, the classic socio-legal literature suggests that expansions of probation instead widen the net of penal control and lead to higher incarceration rates. This article reconsiders probation in the era of mass incarceration, providing the first comprehensive evaluation of the role of probation in the build-up of the criminal justice system. The results suggest that probation was not the primary driver of mass incarceration in most states, nor is it likely to be a simple panacea to mass incarceration. Rather, probation serves both capacities, acting as an alternative and as a net-widener, to varying degrees across time and place. Moving beyond the question of diversion versus net widening, this article presents a new theoretical model of the probation-prison link that examines the mechanisms underlying this dynamic. Using regression models and case studies, I analyze how states can modify the relationship between probation and imprisonment by changing sentencing outcomes and the practices of probation supervision. When combined with other key efforts, reforms to probation can be part of the movement to reverse mass incarceration.

The place of punishment: Variation in the provision of inmate services staff across the punitive turn.

Despite the growing literature on the punitive turn, knowledge of how the experience of American imprisonment varied across time and place remain limited. This article begins to fill that gap, providing a more nuanced portrayal of rehabilitation during the punitive turn. PURPOSE: To examine how one aspect of the rehabilitative ideal in practice-the provision of staff dedicated to inmate services-varied across time and place over the past 30 years. METHODS: The article presents statistics on the inmate-to-staff ratios for inmate services staff (including teachers, counselors, doctors, etc.) between the years 1979 and 2005 for all 50 U.S. states. RESULTS: The analyses reveal that, while there was a substantial decline in the services staff ratio during the 1990s and 2000s, this shift across time paled in comparison to variation across place. Northeastern prison systems, for example, maintained higher inmate services staff ratios in 2005 than Southern states in any year. In addition, results suggest state variation is related to differences in prison crowding, inmates' racial composition, and political cultures. CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest the punitive turn was more variegated and partial than is often assumed and highlight the importance of exploring state variation in penal practices.

Rehabilitation in the Punitive Era: The Gap between Rhetoric and Reality in U.S. Prison Programs.

Scholars of mass incarceration point to the 1970s as a pivotal turning point in U.S. penal history, marked by a shift towards more punitive policies and a consensus that "nothing works" in rehabilitating inmates. However, while there has been extensive research on changes in policy-makers' rhetoric, sentencing policy, and incarceration rates, we know very little about changes in the actual practices of punishment and prisoner rehabilitation. Using nationally representative data for U.S. state prisons, this article demonstrates that there were no major changes in investments in specialized facilities, funding for inmate services-related staff, or program participation rates throughout the late 1970s and the 1980s. Not until the 1990s, more than a decade after the start of the punitive era, do we see patterns of inmate services change, as investments in programming switch from academic to reentry-related programs. These findings suggest that there is a large gap between rhetoric and reality in the case of inmate services and that since the 1990s, inmate "rehabilitation" has increasingly become equated with reentry-related life skills programs.