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| Systems Change In An Era Of Crime Decline |
| By californiaprogressreport.com - Scott MacDonald |
| Published: 06/25/2012 |
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Santa Cruz County Probation Department California is engaging in one of the biggest criminal justice reform implementations in history. The direction the reform will take is dependent on strong leadership and political will at the local level. It is an opportunity for justice administrators to implement systems change and reduce the local systems reliance on incarceration. By focusing reform on systems change – that is evaluating the trajectory offenders undergo within the local justice system – counties can be more successful at developing targeted interventions that reduce the failures that lead to unnecessary incarceration, and provide community based opportunities to implement programs targeted to reduce recidivism. It is now widely recognized that quintupling of the prison population over the past three decades has resulted from key policy decisions that emphasized custodial sentences and longer terms in response to criminal conduct. This was largely unrelated to crime rates or known effective approaches to addressing offender behavior; in fact there are many local strategies that can be implemented to reduce rates of state and local incarceration. During the next three decades the criminal justice system changed to accommodate the burgeoning incarcerated community. Prisons expanded and ceased providing rehabilitative programs, parole agents had fewer re-entry resources at their disposal, and counties largely mirrored the state’s institutional design at the local level. This systemic shift towards custodial correctional practices is now recognized as a failed model. With a recidivism rate of 65% and a prison system fraught with litigation, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) Secretary Matt Cate stated “we incarcerate too many short-term offenders and low-level offenders in California… an incredibly inefficient, ineffective system.” Recent legislative bills have attempted to address this failure by shifting the balance of criminal justice in California back to the local level. Read More. |
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