By Ronald Fraser

State-run parole and probation programs are designed to keep persons convicted of crimes — including a very large number of non-violent crimes — out of prison. But in New Jersey, according to a recent Council of State Governments study, Confined and Costly: How Supervision Violations are Filling Prisons, “On any given day 2,698 people (or 14% of the 2018 New Jersey prison population) are behind bars as a result of a probation or parole violation, at an annual cost to the state of $183 million.”

Parole and probation are court-ordered, non-prison sentences that give offenders a chance to rebuild their lives in a community setting. Not a get-out-of-jail-free-card, each offender agrees to follow a strictly supervised list of conditions that commonly includes mandatory drug testing, keeping regular parole officer visits, paying fines and restitution, holding a job and drug rehab and anger management classes. More restrictive conditions may include searches, prior approval to open a checking account, travel restrictions, electronic monitoring, curfews and off-limit establishments.

Each year about one-quarter of all persons under community supervision successfully complete the terms of their parole and probation and are released. Many of the others struggle with a mental illness or addiction, low education attainment and poor employment skills.

For them, repeated violations of even relatively minor rules can lead to a disciplinary hearing, additional restrictions or a ride on the probation-and-parole-to-prison merry-go-round. In fact, the Council of State Government’s report found that 27% of all persons admitted to New Jersey prisons in 2017 were placed behind bars for parole or probation violations, including conviction for new offenses.

But sooner or later these back-to-prison inmates will return on parole once again with a new set of supervised restrictions to deal with.

The size of New Jersey’s merry-go-round is staggering. For the years 2014-2017, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, prison admissions totaled 35,733. During this four-year period it is likely that as many as 7,000 men and women (21% of 35,733) were returned to prison not for breaking any law but for violating their parole and probation rules.

If New Jersey’s parole and probation programs had worked as intended during 2014-2017, thousands of offenders would not have been locked behind bars but would have remained under community supervision— where they could work on putting their lives back together. That would have dramatically lowered the state’s prison population and saved New Jersey taxpayers about $67,000 a year for each inmate remaining out of prison. How might this happen?

A 2018 report from the PEW Charitable Trusts titled “Probation and Parole Systems Marked by High Stakes, Missed Opportunities," found that one in 55 adults nationally — and one of every 45 New Jersey adults — are on probation or parole. The report also found that many states are already working to strengthen the effectiveness of their probation and parole programs.

“Policymakers across the nation,” the authors write, “are adopting reforms, such as shorter supervision terms and earned compliance credits, and to prioritize supervision and treatment resources for higher-risk individuals while removing lower-risk people from supervision caseloads.”

In practice, this requires that states “fundamentally change the purpose of supervision from punishing failure to promoting success. The goal should be to help people repair the harm they have caused and become self-sufficient, law-abiding citizens, rather than simply enforcing rules set by courts and parole boards, catching violators and imposing penalties, including incarceration.”

As these reforms are put into practice, prison populations will go down, state taxes will go down and, best of all, thousands of New Jerseyites will stand a better chance of putting prison life behind them for good.

Ronald Fraser, Ph.D., writes on public policy issues for the DKT Liberty Project, a Washington-based civil liberties organization.

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