Intermediate Sanctions

Different Types of IPs

Some of the more common types of IPs are the following:

• 1.
  Day Fines. Fines based on an offender's daily earnings. Offense categories are broken down into punishment units, and the value of each unit is then set at a percentage of the offender's daily income. Day fines are unlike regular fines, which are based on the offense and not on the offender's ability to pay.
• 2.
  Restitution. A cash payment by the offender to the victim to offset the loss incurred by the victim (insurance deductibles, medical expenses, etc.).
• 3.
  Community Service. Court-ordered nonpaid work for a specified number of hours that offenders must perform, usually for some charitable or public service organization. Unlike restitution, this sanction is concerned with paying back the community, not the victim per se.
• 4.
  Day Reporting Centers. Community centers to which offenders report in lieu of incarceration or as a condition of probation. A variety of community and inhouse programs are usually offered, such as job readiness training and drug abuse education.
• 5.
  Intensive Probation Supervision. A court-ordered program of community supervision by probation officers working with very small caseloads to provide intensive supervision. This sanction is usually viewed as an alternative to incarceration.
• 6.
  House Arrest. A special condition of probation that requires an offender to remain within the confines of his or her home except for work, shopping, community service, and other court-sanctioned activities.
• 7.
  Electronic Monitoring. A telecommunications device designed to verify that an offender is at a specified location during specified times. This sanction is ordinarily combined with house arrest.
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• 8.
  Community Residential Centers (formerly known as halfway houses). These are nonconfining residential facilities and are often intended for offenders who are failing on probation (front-door sanction) or who need a period of readjustment after being released from incarceration (a back-door sanction).
• 9.
  Split Sentences. A brief (perhaps six-month) period of jail incarceration followed by a term of probation. Variations include shock probation and intermittent incarceration.
• 10.
  Boot Camps. A physically rigorous, disciplined, and demanding regimen emphasizing conditioning, education and treatment, and job training. Typically designed for young, nonviolent felony offenders. Stays are usually short (90–120 days).

The Need for Intermediate Punishments

Although some enhancement IPs have been around for some time (e.g., restitution and community service), many IPs—such as intensive supervision, electronic monitoring, and boot camps—began in earnest in the mid-1980s and grew substantially in the following decades. Their genesis and growth can be attributed to the following factors:

• 1.
  Overcrowding crisis. During the mid-1980s, correctional populations were soaring, forcing policy makers to search for alternative ways to sanction and control criminal offenders. Also, the effectiveness of jail and prison in controlling crime started to be seriously questioned.
• 2.
  Standard probation's ineffectiveness. A landmark study by Petersilia and colleagues (1985) forced policymakers and the public to rethink probation eligibility criteria and public safety, finding public safety risks in placing on routine probation felons who were ineffectively supervised. Two-thirds of the nearly 2,000 probationers tracked during this study were rearrested within three years, and more than half were reconvicted of serious offenses.
• 3.
  Cost-savings potential. Comparatively, jail and prison are very expensive sanctions, usually around $50 per day or $20,000 per year (a conservative estimate). Even the most expensive kind of community supervision—house arrest with electronic monitoring, using satellite technology—is around $15 to $20 per day, and, in many jurisdictions, offenders pay this fee themselves.
• 4.
  Versatility. IPs add more versatility to the sentencing and revocation process. Every offender is unique; for some, prison is too harsh; for others, probation is too lenient. Many judges like the idea of having a number of sanctions available to them so they can more appropriately tailor the sentence to the specific offender's needs. Similarly, more versatility and options are available in the revocation process. Instead of sending offenders to jail or prison for noncompliance with supervision rules, judges can use IPs to tighten or increase the conditions of probation to encourage compliance with supervision. With “tourniquet sentencing” of this sort, a judge may order that an offender on regular probation who is not doing well be placed on house arrest with electronic monitoring, to “turn up the heat,” so to speak. Adding to their versatility is the fact that many IPs can be used at different points within the criminal justice system. For instance, some IPs (such as electronic monitoring and house arrest) can be used on a pretrial basis (before guilt or innocence has been determined) in lieu of incarceration. Many of these sanctions also can be used on recently convicted offenders as a condition of probation, to help supervise offenders who require more control and/or surveillance than ordinary probation would provide. Finally, some IPs can be used as a condition of parole to require offenders who are being released from jail or prison to serve the remainder of their sentences within the community. IPs can and have been used on juveniles and adults alike.
• 5.
  Meeting the public's need for punishment. Many believe that, if nothing else, many of these relatively new sanctions are punitive or punishment oriented. The 1980s ushered in a new era of conservatism in which offenders were given increased doses of punishment, and rehabilitation and treatment were downplayed. This period witnessed the reinstatement of dormant death penalties, the advent and spread of “three-strikes” legislation, the abolition of parole in some states, the reinstitution of chain gangs, and the dispensing of military drill and discipline (through boot camps) to criminal offenders. There was nothing new about the use of many of these sanctions; for instance, even boot camp prisons had their beginnings in the late 1800s, when Zebulon Brockway was running the Elmira Reformatory in New York. These sanctions were simply brought back or modified somewhat to fit contemporary needs. Many researchers believe that these new sanctions had at least to appear punitive in order to be sold to the public and ultimately to the politicians and policy makers. Without a punitive component, it would have been difficult to promote sanctions that were giving many offenders an [Page 914]opportunity to live in the community rather than in jail or prison.

When educated about different sanctions, what they realistically involve, and what their costs and effectiveness are, the public generally supports the use of IPs for appropriate offenders and believes them to be sufficiently punitive for many types of offenses and offenders. Also, according to many studies, the public has not given up on treatment and rehabilitation for the majority of criminal offenders, suggesting that the public may not be as punitive as criminal justice policy makers originally thought them to be. More important, what do offenders themselves think about IPs and where they fall on the punishment continuum? How punitive do offenders consider IPs to be? Spelman (1995) asked 128 convicted offenders to rate the severity of twenty-six felony punishments, ranging from six months' regular or standard probation to five years in prison. Seventy-five percent of offenders rated one or more IPs as more severe than an incarcerative sanction.

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