Grits got the ball rolling on a discussion about real criminal justice reform. A blog called The Wretched of the Earth, written by a public defender, picked it up and ran with it with these two posts about probation reform. Check them out.
The way I see it, the goal of probation should be almost entirely one of rehabilitation. It’s not a deterrent, at least not in the way that incarceration is, and it’s not really punitive, at least in theory. You don’t want these people in prison, either during or after their probationary period, so it makes sense for the probation to be something that they want to see through. If there’s a high rate of violations that lead to incarceration, or if people choose jail over probation when given the option because it’s viewed as a less onerous sentence to serve, then something is very wrong, and as we’ve seen, the end result is that it costs more money and disrupts more people’s lives than it should. We need to make sure the way we apply probation is in line with our intentions.
Thanks for picking this up. We’ve had a pretty good discussion about probation and it’s mostly due to all the generous links I got. I’m going to keep this discussion going and cover a bunch of different suggestions (from Grits and other sources – and probably a few of my own hair-brained ones).
thanks again.