By Niloufer Taber, Amanda Nowak, Maurice Smith,   Jennifer Yang, Celia Strumph   

Pell Grant restoration took effect on July 1, 2023, making incarcerated people in the United States eligible for need-based federal postsecondary financial aid for the first time in nearly 30 years. Since the launch of the Second Chance Pell Experimental Sites Initiative (SCP) in 2016, more than 45,000 incarcerated students have enrolled in SCP programs. Today, there are more than 750,000 people in prison eligible to enroll in a postsecondary program. As the landscape of postsecondary education in prison evolves, so does its potential. In this report, the Vera Institute of Justice offers a snapshot of national progress toward implementation using the interconnected domains of quality, equity, and scale through a “balanced scorecard” approach. Drawing on data collected from surveys to SCP colleges and corrections agencies, the report aggregates individual responses to evaluate the adequacy and the system of education offered to incarcerated people. The result is a snapshot of the progress colleges and corrections agencies have made over the first year of this new era of access and opportunity.

‍Key Takeaway: Serving students in prisons requires collaboration and cooperation across a range of stakeholders. Vera assessed quality, equity, and scale through data aggregated at the level of each jurisdiction. The measures in this report are an invitation

New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2024. 64p.

By Emily Lupton Lupez,  Steffie Woolhandler, ; David U. Himmelstein

Growing old and dying inside: improving the experiences of older people serving long prison sentences Dr Jayne Price In partnership with the Building Futures Programme. This report is an uncomfortable read, shining a stark light on the difficulties faced by the increasing number of older people serving long sentences. For me, four issues stand out from the consultation that underpins this report. First, the experiences of the men and women who took part powerfully illustrate the mismatch between the diverse needs of this often-hidden group of people and the rigidity of many prison regimes. These needs cannot be met by the prison system alone but raise important challenges for health and social care commissioners and providers, as well as external partners involved in the provision of purposeful activities. Second, that this activity is critical for many older people serving long sentences. But many find that few opportunities are available to them. For the ageing population future employment is less of a concern, how their time, often decades, can be spent productively and meaningfully in activities suited to their age and length of sentence. The testimonies here suggest that governors should enhance the role that prisoners themselves can play in supporting others. This report suggests that when encouraged effectively, those serving long sentences can help to fill the gaps that currently exist in many parts of the estate. Third, like much of PRT’s Building Futures Programme, this report demonstrates the value of enabling people with lived experience to engage in issues of operational and policy improvement and provides ideas for positive change. It also includes very personal, honest, and desperate reflections about the experience of incarceration. This underlines what we see at Recoop: many older people inside feel they are punished not just through losing their liberty but also through a series of humiliations and deprivations throughout their sentence, which can get harder as they age. Finally, those who participated in this report provide a painful reminder of the need for a national strategy for older prisoners; something promised by the government in 2020 but yet to be published. The pressure on the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) to provide decent, safe, and rehabilitative secure environments is probably as acute as it has ever been, particularly with the current and very real overcrowding challenges. This cannot be achieved without a comprehensive, integrated and estate-wide approach. The long-awaited older prisoner strategy must address the changes required, including ensuring funding and commissioning is in alignment. This requires joint working and commitment from the MoJ, Public Health and NHS England to fulfil their collective responsibilities to address the perfect storm of issues that is painfully illustrated in this report. Without this, it will not be able to deliver what is needed. 

London: Prison Reform Trust, 2024. 52p.

By Jacob Schuman

Community supervision is a major form of criminal punishment and a major driver of mass incarceration.  Over 3.5 million people in the United States are serving terms of probation, parole, or supervised release, and revocations account for nearly half of all prison admissions.  Although supervision is intended to prevent crime and promote reentry, it can also interfere with the defendant’s reintegration by imposing onerous restrictions as well as punishment for non-criminal technical violations.  Probation officers also carry heavy caseloads, which forces them to spend more time on enforcing conditions and less on providing support.

Fortunately, the criminal justice system also includes a mechanism to solve these problems: early termination of community supervision.  From the beginning, the law has always provided a way for the government to cut short a defendant’s term of supervision if they could demonstrate that they had reformed themselves.  Recently, judges, correctional officials, and activists have called to increase rates of early termination in order to save resources, ease the reentry process, and encourage rehabilitation.  Yet despite all this attention from the field, there are no law-review articles on terminating supervision early.

In this Article, I provide the first comprehensive analysis of early termination of community supervision.  First, I recount the long history of early termination, from the invention of probation and parole in the 1800s to the Safer Supervision Act of 2023.  Next, I identify and critique recent legal changes that have made it harder for federal criminal defendants to win early termination of supervised release.  Finally, I propose the first empirically based sentencing guideline on terminating supervision early, which I recommend in most cases after 18 to 36 months.  If community supervision drives mass incarceration, then early termination offers a potential tool for criminal justice reform. American Criminal Law Review, Forthcoming,  2024.

By Ryan Cotter

This study, the seventh in the recidivism series, examines the relationship between length of incarceration and recidivism. In 2020, the Commission published its initial comprehensive study on length of incarceration and recidivism. In that study, which examined offenders released in 2005, the Commission found that federal offenders receiving sentences of more than 60 months were less likely to recidivate compared to a similar group of offenders receiving shorter sentences. This study replicates the prior analysis, however, it examines a more current cohort of federal offenders released in 2010. This study examines the relationship between length of incarceration and recidivism, specifically exploring three potential relationships that may exist: incarceration as having a deterrent effect, a criminogenic effect, or no effect on recidivism.

Washington, DC: United States Sentencing Commission, 2022. 56p.

By Kelly Lyn Mitchell and Ebony Ruhland

Since 2019, Ramsey County Community Corrections (RCCC) and the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice have collaborated on the Reducing Revocations Challenge, a CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance national initiative supported by Arnold Ventures that is dedicated to understanding the drivers of probation revocations and identifying ways to reduce them when appropriate. This study investigated the underlying causes of failure to maintain contact violations by interviewing individuals on probation in Ramsey County, Minnesota. A significant finding from our research is that "failure to maintain contact" with probation officers, often called "absconding" in other jurisdictions, is a prevalent violation, accounting for 29% of probation violations and 23% of revocations. Additionally, this study sought to understand how people on probation experienced being apprehended on a warrant, the issuance of which was reported to be a frequent response for failure to maintain contact violations. On the surface, the reasons for failure to maintain contact seemed straightforward. However, individual stories revealed much more complex situations, including struggles with substance abuse, lack of basic needs, and missteps by the probation department. This study also revealed several potential areas for improvement that could reduce failure to maintain contact violations in the future, such as assessing and addressing basic needs to increase compliance and reestablishing communication with individuals who are unresponsive but not necessarily hiding.

Minneapolis: Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, University of Minnesota, 2023. 38p.

By Connie Utada, Rebecca Smith,  April Rodriguez

Adults on probation—supervision imposed by the court generally in lieu of incarceration—are more than twice as likely to have a serious or moderate mental illness as those in the general public, according to analysis of federal data from 2015 to 2019 by The Pew Charitable Trusts. This translates into over 830,000 adults with a mental illness who are on probation at any given time each year, or almost a quarter of all those on probation. Most of these individuals also have a co-occurring substance use disorder, with the rate of adults on probation with both a mental illness and substance abuse disorder over five times that of adults in the public. A recent survey of probation agencies nationwide conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) in partnership with Pew and the American Probation and Parole Association indicated that although agencies were aware that 20% to 25% of people under their supervision had mental health issues, most agencies did not have specialized mental health approaches and provided their officers with limited training related to mental health. Some officers who were interviewed said that they lacked the tools needed to successfully supervise people with a mental illness on probation, and that many people with a mental illness are placed on probation because other alternatives that don’t involve the justice system—such as diversion to treatment—aren’t being used or aren’t available.1 This lack of resources may be contributing to poorer criminal justice outcomes for people with a mental illness who are on probation, such as an increased likelihood of being arrested or going to prison. Some of the research’s key findings: People with a mental illness are more likely to be on probation than those without, and this disparity was even more pronounced for women and those with a co-occurring substance use disorder. Analysis of data from 2015 to 2019 showed that: Almost 3.5% of adults with a mental illness were on probation annually, compared with 1.7% of all adults. Among adults with co-occurring disorders, 8.5% were on probation annually. Women with a mental illness on probation were overrepresented relative to men. While 21% of all people on probation had a mental illness, the share of women on probation with a mental illness (31%) was almost twice that of men (16%). Many people on probation with a mental illness have more criminal justice contacts than those on probation without a mental illness. Adults with a mental illness who reported being on probation at some point during the year were more likely to be arrested during that year than those without a mental illness. ° Individuals with a mental illness who were on probation were more likely to go to prison for a new offense or for violating probation terms than those without a mental illness. Among people who were sent to prison from probation, those with a mental illness reported being arrested more often, going to prison more often, and being on probation more times than those without a mental illness. Many probation agencies lack the tools to support officers in supervising people with a mental illness, such as specialized approaches, staff training, and flexibility in setting supervision conditions. Among all responding agencies, 41% indicated they had a specialized mental health approach; among rural agencies, this dropped to 26%. 

North Carolina: Pew Charitable Trusts, 2024, 28p.