CRJ 456

Corrections in the Community

Professor Jess Maghan - email: jmaghan@gmail.com

Where does one run...when he is already in the promised land? -- Robert Dupont, MD

Society has a center. There is a central zone in the structure of society. This central zone impinges in various ways on those who live within the ecological domain in which the society exists. Its centrality has, however, nothing to do with geometry and little with geography. The center, or the central zone, is a phenomenon of the realm of values and beliefs, which govern the society. The larger society appears to consist of a number of interdependent subsystems - the economy, the status system, the polity, the kinship system, and the institutions which have in their special custody the cultivation of cultural values. The central value system is the central zone of the society. The value systems obtaining in any diversified society may be regarded as being distributed along range. There are variants of the central value system running from hyper-affirmation to an extreme denial of some of these major elements in the central value system.

There is always a considerable amount of unintegratedness of values and beliefs among individuals and sections of a society. A differentiated large-scale society will always be compelled by professional specialization, tradition, and the normal distribution of human capacities. Some persons will always be a bit closer to the center; some will always be more distant from the center. Edward Shils, The Constitution of Society, (1982).

Recidivism is a near worthless concept when it comes to making practical judgments about human beings who are subject to the criminal justice process. Prisons undoubtedly influence people to be more, rather than less, criminalistic; but the more powerful and immediate influences are in the community. Recidivism says more to us about society as a whole than about prisons. There is simply no way of knowing what recidivism rates actually are.

The most expertly devised, carefully executed studies are unfailingly shot through with variables and unknown factors. Untold thousands of those who are entered into the statistics as failures (because they return to prison within a prescribed period) eventually succeed in straightening out their lives. How can we justify giving such inordinate importance to a statistical concept, which purports to tell us something about the behavior of human beings, while ignoring qualitative considerations? An example of what I mean is provided by the person who is paroled after serving time for bank robbery and is then declared a parole violator and sent back to prison, not because he returns to bank robbery but because of a drunk and disorderly conviction.

Unlikely? Not at all. This is highly typical of circumstances whereby offenders become recidivists. And what of the young offender whose first hitch in prison provides him with criminal skills of the sort which enable him to see to it that there is no second hitch? He becomes a "success case" as far as recidivism statistics are concerned, while the individual in the first instance is marked down as a "repeat offender."

When these ideas come to be understood, when more sophisticated alternatives to incarceration come to be available, when some of the vengefulness is taken out of the criminal statutes and more reasonableness in sentencing policy can be achieved, we shall have little use for prisons. Meanwhile, in the name of humanity we must drastically change their character. Life in a typical prison is not quite what most people think it is. The most destructive forces are depersonalization, stultifying boredom, lack of privacy, and a pervasive sense of alienation.

In addition, there is the matter-of-fact acceptance of virulent sexual pathology and the brooding presence of threatened violence which accompany a prison's preoccupation with homosexuality, drugs, and gambling--in that order. The most common effect of the prison experience is a slow water-drip disfigurement of the human spirit. The greatest tragedy is that those who adjust to it best are damaged most. Because we do not know what else to do, we continue to confine in prisons those among us who fail most seriously--those whose failure takes the form of criminal behavior. We place people who fail in settings which are, in effect, academics for failure.

Surely we must know by now that something else must be done. It has been suggested that, at the very least, we must require that prisons be safe and humane. I submit that as long as prisons deprive their inhabitants of dignity and individuality, as long as they fail to give them opportunities to make some positive choices about their lives, as long as they continue to function behind the high walls of defensiveness and isolation from the community--they will never be safe; they will never be humane. Prisons, as we have allowed them to be for over 200 years, nurture the worst in people. Charles Campbell, Serving Time Together: Men and Women in Prison.

Probation had its origin in ordinary philanthropy. The familiar story of John Augustus, a shoemaker in Lexington, Massachusetts, serves to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of probation as a vehicle for correctional treatment. Augustus became interested in court procedure in his community and was impressed with the destructive futility of incarceration for drunkards, prostitutes, and petty offenders.

Gradually he developed a system whereby he would bail out an offender after conviction and undertake to supervise his conduct in the community. Augustus’ highly personal approach included aid to the offender's family, arrangements to find him employment, and friendly counseling over a reasonable period of time. At an agreed point, Augustus would report the offender's progress to the court, and sentence on the original offense would be pronounced.

Usually it was a fine of one cent, and the offender would be sent home. Augustus began his work in 1827. By 1858, a year before his death, he had bailed out nearly two thousand offenders. It was not until 1899 that probation gathered real momentum with the inception of the juvenile court movement, for which a probation service was an obvious necessity. The strength of the probation idea lies in the economy afforded by maintaining offenders in the community instead of sending them to jail or prison, and in the humane assistance provided by the probation officer.

Accordingly, the state has set up probation agencies to carry out community correctional treatment. Currently, responsibilities have been added for pre-sentence investigations, surveillance of the probationer, and reports to the court on probation violations. Although the differences between probation and parole are important in legal contexts, the treatment problems are identical.

...the most impressive factor is the consideration that the individuals we release and supervise are those who have failed in school or failed in work, failed in family, failed in all phases of community and have even failed in crime. Offender Russell G. Oswald, The Paroled Offender

CORRECTIONS IN THE COMMUNITY

Obviously, before we can indulge in the study and analysis of corrections in the community, we must have a firm understanding and working definition of the concept of community and the reality of community corrections in both a historical and a contemporary context. The idea that communities (and change) have a strong influence on crime and offending is central within criminology and criminal justice. It is probably as important as the idea that individual characteristics and individual development are crucial for understanding offending. However, the links between the two approaches are not well developed. In recent decades there has been increasing awareness that if criminology and criminal justice are to advance, more attention must be given to integration of individual and ecological/environmental approaches. It boils down to the classical question of how individuals and environments interact. Per-Olof H. Wikstrom, "Communities and Crime"(1998:269) in The Handbook of Crime and Punishment, Michael Tonry, Editor.

According to Latessa and Allen (1997:3-4), the term community corrections refers to numerous and diverse types of supervision, treatment, reintegration, control, and support programs for criminal law violators. As correctional clients move further into the justice system, community corrections programs have been developed and designed to minimize their further processing and penetration into the justice system. These pre-imprisonment programs include restitution, community service, active probation, intensive supervised probation, house arrest, and residential community activities, such as halfway houses. Community corrections continues after incarceration, and in some cases is combined with incarceration and among the many programs found at this level are split sentences (jail followed by probation), shock incarceration and shock probation, prison furlough programs, work and educational release, shock parole, and standard parole programs and services.

Unfortunately, corrections is a victim of its own language...a language of slogans. By the end of this course you should not indulge naively in "slogans" (when you think in slogans you usually end up with only one theory) -- but you will be able to delineate the criminological theory used to justify community correctional programs. You will be able to establish the "connection" between a treatment modality and crime. You will be able to show the interplay between the two. That is, you will be able to provide accurate descriptions of the reality of the treatment vis-a-vis the crime. This is the work of a true penologist, locating and analyzing both the philosophical and the theoretical underpinnings of modern community correctional programs.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

Todd R. Clear and Harry Dammer, THE OFFENDER IN THE COMMUNITY, Belmont, CA., Wadsworth Publishers/Thomas Learning, 1999; [plus INFOTRAC/College Edition http://www.infotrac-college.com/wadsworth].Four Provided free with purchase of course textbook. Note: You must have the course textbook and a standard (Oxford or Webster's) dictionary in class with you at all times.

CLASS REQUIREMENTS:

This course is conducted as an advanced undergraduate and graduate seminar. You will be expected to complete the readings before the assigned dates and will be graded on your contributions to the discussion based upon your own analysis and interpretation. This includes the readings in the required text plus any additional readings distributed. There will also be a final examination for this course. Students are also expected to maintain a glossary of words, terms, and concepts related to community corrections. This glossary can be submitted at the final examination for consideration of extra full grade points. The objective of this glossary development assignment is to enrich your capabilities for analyzing sources of information and to develop the ability for making necessary distinctions of definitions within the "text" and "context" of the course content and subsets of subject matter.

Your specific in-class oral responses to the reading assignments and related course discussions will be configured on a 20-point scale. With five (20 point) assignments per student, the total reading response scores will constitute a full mid-term examination grade. In terms of the oral presentation regarding class reading assignments, you should summarize the readings, discuss the materials' strengths and weaknesses, and raise questions for the selected respondent and general class discussion. Feel free to bring supplemental materials and suggested readings to our attention. You should lead the discussion for approximately fifteen minutes. Class members should help presenters draw attention to salient issues prior to the class and again during class discussion.

The bulk of your grade, however, is vested in your formal research paper. This paper is to be developed from the primary text of the course, Corrections in the Community, Clear and Dammer (1999). Utilizing this text, augmented with other course reading assignments, discussions, and resources, you must choose a community corrections program and develop an accurate description of the reality of the treatment vis-à-vis the crime. The summation of your paper for other course members will highly influence your final grade. Again, your major assignment, a research paper presenting the theoretical underpinnings of a community correctional program (six to eight pages), allows you to investigate the dominant themes regarding corrections in the community. You must very early in the course determine which community corrections program you will choose. Then, begin developing your portfolio to substantiate it. For example, you may want to explore in greater depth the program you selected for your paper, via actual observation of institutional operations or in-depth interviews with appropriate community correctional personnel.

Submit a premise statement and short outline with at least eight scholarly references on Thursday, January 27, 2000. You will receive it back on Tuesday, February 15, 2000 with an approval to proceed or perhaps some suggestions to modify it. You will have until Thursday, April 06, 2000. [NOTE: LATE PAPERS AUTOMATICALLY LOSE ONE LETTER GRADE PER DAY]. Graduate Students enrolled in this course will have a separate and specific research paper topic assigned (see me for details).

Ground Rules:

People have to show up in life: your attendance pattern (tardiness/absenteeism) will be factored into your final academic grade determination. Warning do not exceed five absentee days in this course semester. Do NOT bring food into this classroom (fifty minutes of abstinence from food and drink is nourishing to the body and soul...especially at 8 AM).

READING SCHEDULE