Political Determinants of Corrections Policy

Ideology and budgets are prominent at each step of the public policy process. This process involves problem identification, formulation, and evaluation. Tough choices must be made to address crime and to create correctional options, including incarceration/incapacitation in prison (or jail) and community alternatives. Conflicts between conservative and liberal ideologies and the reality of scarce funding are contributing to the evolution of corrections policy. Nonetheless, the promulgation of correctional policies precedes few ideological compromises. Examples include the crime and corrections laws in the United States based on the Model Penal Code published by the American Law Institute in 1962. States have made subsequent changes to crime categories, and there are explicit divergences from the Model Penal Code for punishments that are aligned to contemporary jurisdictional practice. Community sanction alternatives for offenders have become an integral part of the criminal justice system as police, prosecutors, and adult and juvenile corrections personnel use laws to place nonviolent and less serious offenders under community supervision.

A prominent theme that influences corrections policy is interest in reintegrating offenders into the community. Interdisciplinary concerns of offender reentry converge in crime and corrections policy areas as traditionalists in fields of criminology, sociology, and psychology and scholars in public affairs, administration, and law try to understand policy making. In the United States, corrections policy is a product of the political process. The 21st-century movement to place offenders in community programs, such as work release and therapeutic housing programs, rather than “warehousing” them in prisons (or jails), is primarily for economic reasons; support is waning for “overreliance” on incarceration. Ideally, the policy process would have what it needs to make “commonsense” crime and corrections policies. Although some believe the political determinants of corrections policy are limited to politicians in the legislative process, an expanded view of corrections policy examines the public policy process and effects of ideology, law, and actors.