Abstract
Advocates for reform have highlighted violations of probation and parole conditions as a key driver of mass incarceration. As a 2019 Council of State Governments report declared, supervision violations are “filling prisons and burdening budgets.” Yet few scholarly accounts estimate the precise role of technical violations in fueling prison populations during the prison boom. Using national surveys of state prison populations from 1979 to 2016, the authors document that most incarcerated persons are behind bars for new sentences. On average, just one in eight people in state prisons on any given day has been locked up for a technical violation of community supervision alone. Thus, strategies to substantially reduce prison populations must look to new criminal offenses and sentence length.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Journal | Socius |
| Volume | 9 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 1 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Our thanks to Tracy Snell at the Bureau of Justice Statistics for helpful advice on data cleaning and analysis and to Audrey Dorélien, Ryan Larson, Jane Sumner, and Elizabeth Wrigley-Field for suggestions on the data visualization. Thanks also to Khoa Vu for expert research assistance, supported by the Minnesota Population Center, which receives funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Award number P2CHD041023).
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2023.
Keywords
- community supervision
- mass imprisonment
- parole
- probation
- technical violations
PubMed: MeSH publication types
- Journal Article