Community Corrections

Developing Community Corrections and Questioning its Performance

The roots of probation and parole lie more in social casework than law enforcement. Probation began in 1841, when John Augustus posted bail to release a “drunkard” from a Boston jail, worked with the man for 3 weeks toward rehabilitation, and convinced a judge that the man had reformed his ways and should be set free. He went on to bail more than 2,000 offenders and assist them with employment, housing, and other issues. Parole began in 1840, when Alexander Maconochie developed a “mark system” by which prisoners at Norfolk Island could earn early release for good behavior. By the 1860s, this precursor to modern parole had been adopted in the United States. Over the past 150 years, community corrections have traveled a great distance from their rehabilitative roots to embrace the “tough on crime” stance that prevails today.

In modern probation and parole, an officer is tasked with (a) protecting community safety by monitoring and enforcing an offender's compliance with the rules of conditional release from incarceration and, often to a lesser extent, (b) promoting the offender's rehabilitation with social service referrals such as substance abuse counseling and vocational support. Despite this commonality, probation and parole differ in terms of who is supervised. A probationer is an offender who, on conviction, is typically sentenced directly to a term of community supervision (although a minority of probationers are granted a conditional suspended sentence to incarceration). In contrast, a parolee is convicted of a relatively serious offense, serves a portion of his or her sentence in prison, and is then granted conditional early release to serve the remainder of his or her sentence in the community. Although probation is applied in the federal system and all 50 states, the federal system and at least 15 states have abolished parole in favor of determinant sentencing.

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