Terminating Supervision Early American Criminal Law Review, Forthcoming
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.