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 Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson and Cal Winslow
From one point of view eighteenth-century England, with its settled aristocracy and gentry, its polite arts and culture, its urbane politics of interest and influence, appears as a stable, self-assured civilization. Historians have often described it as such. From another point of view it appears very differently. Year after year new capital offenses were enacted. In the heart of London great crowds asembled at hte regular publichang- ing days, and there were riots beneath the gallows at Tyburn for the possession of the bodies of the condemned. Highwaymen beset the roads of London. Large parties of armed smugglers invested parts of the coast. The estate papers of the great some- times reveal that they were more concerned about wholesale poaching on their lands than they were about rentals or crops.
This book explores these contrasts: a settled ruling class which could only rule through forms of judicial terror; a popu- lace deferential by day but deeply insubordinate by night; a class justice which defended property through the fair form of law. Instead of general description, the authors offer a number of detailed studies. An important introductory chapter discloses the way in which the law replaced religion at the center of the ideology of England's rulers, and analyzes the astonishing adaptability of the legal system to the same pressures of ni- fluence, interest, and property which dominated political life.
NY. Pantheon. 1975. 357p. CONTAINS MARK-UP
Edited by Richard H.Walters, J.Allencheyne And Robin K.Banks
From the cover: Progressive thought in education and childcare prefers to stress reward rather than punishment. Yet people do punish each other constantly in a multitude of subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways. What then are the occasions and effects of this persistent form of behaviour?
The work collected here explains the role of the concept in psychology and illuminates the cluster of ideas,acts and. emotions - fear, resistance, anxiety, masochism, self-criticism, obedience, socialization- that surrounds acts of punishment.
The editors move from laboratory to life and from theory to application throughout the book. 'This organization has led to a combination of both animal and human research and, when other considerations seemed about equal, to a preference for work at the human level.
By Graeme R. Newman
The practice of mass incarceration has come under increasing criticism by criminologists and corrections experts who, nevertheless, find themselves at a loss when it comes to offering credible, practical, and humane alternatives. In Civilization and Barbarism, Graeme R. Newman argues this impasse has arisen from a refusal to confront the original essence of punishment, namely, that in some sense it must be painful. He begins with an exposition of the traditional philosophical justifications for punishment and then provides a history of criminal punishment. He shows how, over time, the West abandoned short-term corporal punishment in favor of longer-term incarceration, justifying a massive bureaucratic prison complex as scientific and civilized. Newman compels the reader to confront the biases embedded in this model and the impossibility of defending prisons as a civilized form of punishment. A groundbreaking work that challenges the received wisdom of “corrections,” Civilization and Barbarism asks readers to reconsider moderate corporal punishment as an alternative to prison and, for the most serious offenders, forms of incapacitation without prison.
The book also features two helpful appendixes: a list of debating points, with common criticisms and their rebuttals, and a chronology of civilized punishments.
Albany NY. SUNY Press. 2019. 272p.
NOTE: This file is a prepublication proof and may contain occasional errors.
By Robert Hughes
(Mr Hughes) has felt his way back into the past with passion and insight, mined an enormous mass of material and welded the results of his researches into a commanding narrative... Already widely known as an art critic, he now reveals his formidable gifts as a social htstonan " —The New York Times
'Although The Fatal Shore is both lengthy and scholarly, it is alio fun to read One of Hughes's greatest gifts as a joumalist has always been his ability to express senous themes in accessible language. In his marvelous new history, he brings convict Australia to life both in his own words and those of its inhabitants……The idiosyncratic voices of the individual convicts he quotes imbue the narrative with the spark and savor of real life in all its chaotic, intimate detail. This kind of history is as exciting and entertaining as a good novel.” — Chicago Sun-Times
NY. Vintage. 1988. 743p.
By Rebecca Roberts, Claire Campbell and Deborah Coles
Every four days a person takes their life in prison, and rising numbers of ‘natural’ and unclassified deaths are too often found to relate to serious failures in healthcare. The lack of government action on official recommendations is leading to preventable deaths.
Deaths in prison: a national scandal exposes dangerous, longstanding failures across the prison estate and historically high levels of deaths in custody and offers unique insight and analysis into findings from 61 prison inquests in England and Wales in 2018 and 2019.
The report details repeated safety failures including mental and physical healthcare, communication systems, emergency responses, and drugs and medication. It also looks at the wider statistics and historic context, showing the repetitive and persistent nature of such failings.
With case studies of deaths and inquest findings, it tells the harrowing human stories behind the statistics (see page 9). INQUEST also details the experiences of bereaved families who struggle to access minimal legal aid for inquests, while prisons automatically receive millions in public funding.
London: INQUEST, 2020. 20p.
By Robert Johnson
From the Preface: Hard Time is a book about prisons.The focus is on men, but core concerns of women are considered as well. The book explores what I believe are basic human dimensions of prison life and adjustment, and closes with an inclusive, person-centered vision of prison reform. Firsthand testimony and observations drawn from people who live or work in prisons are highlighted and specially marked with black squares (H) throughout the book. Most of the people we send to prison are men, roughly 94 percent. Most prisoners serve time in prisons that are, as living environments if not in terms of strict classification criteria, maximum-security institutions.1 The maximum- security prison for men has served as the explicit or implicit model—the point of departure if not the template—for virtually all men’s prisons and many women's prisons as well. Life in these prisons is depriving and painful. On that score at least, prisons vary in degree, not kind. The inhabitants of every prison serve hard time. Nothing can change this basic and enduring fact. That hard time can also be constructive time is, in my view, the key to understanding and reforming the prison.
Belmont, CA. Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.2001. 356p.
By Jan Gorecki
From the Preface: Capital punishment is today among the most controversial problems in America. On the one hand, the heat of the controversy exceeds the weight of the problem; as is pointed out in this book, it is not the presence or absence of capital punishment but other legal reforms that are essential for effective functioning of the criminal justice system in this country. On the other hand, however, whether we send criminals to the gallows presents a moral dilemma of utmost importance. Owing to the heat of the controversy, recommendations abound both for and against retaining the death penalty. This book does not explicitly support either of these stands; the purpose here is to understand rather than to recommend. More specifically, the purpose is to analyze and explain what has occurred to the death penalty in the United States and to anticipate cautiously what may occur in the future. This does not, however, mean that the book is void of practical implications. If a reader accepts the analysis and explanation to be offered, he may, and probably will, be aided in accepting a stand on what the legal system should do—abolish the death penalty or retain it.
The book starts with a brief analysis of the law of capital punishment. It is a vacillating and confused law, recently shifting from near-abolition to retention. Its development is influenced by a clash of two conflicting forces—the general tendency of social evolution toward milder criminal sanctions and the increasingly punitive attitudes in America today. These two forces are scrutinized and accounted for in the second and third parts of the book. The scrutiny not only explains the development of the law but also throws some light on the future of the death penalty in America.
NY. Columbia University Press. 1983. 163p.