Justice reinvestment in community supervision

Abstract

Theproposition of “justice reinvestment” is attractive on the surface. If the money now spent on reducing crime by keeping people in prison could prevent just as much crime, or even more crime, if spent some other way, then why not do so? And if the problem is a defective budget mechanism, unable to translate prison savings into funding for the programs that could replace prison, then the obvious solution is to change the budget mechanism. Such a change would be “justice reinvestment” as a policy, rather than merely as a slogan. In “A private sector, incentives-based model for justice reinvestment,” Todd Clear (2011, this issue) makes a valiant attempt to imagine such a policy, focused on privatesector employers and community-based nongovernmental organization program operators offering employment and housing to the particular offenders whose nonincarceration will pay for the programs. But each of those choices—community focus, services orientation, delivery to specific offenders, and nongovernmental actors—has alternatives, and the article offers us no clear reason to think that those are the right choices in terms of crime control. The literature on recidivism reduction via service delivery—the “reentry” literature—for themost part,makes for fairly depressing reading; a program thatmoves the 3-year return-toprison rate from 66% to 60% counts as a success. Given that the total annual prison budget is only $60 billion, the potential savings from reduced incarceration can hardly finance major increases in social-service budgets or fuel major upsurges in neighborhood economic activity, even if spent in ways that lead to respending within the affected neighborhoods. By contrast, there are strong reasons to think that improved probation and parole supervision—as opposed to enhanced services—can make a big difference in reoffending and reincarceration, and can do so for small sums compared with the savings from reduced