By Sarah Hean, Siv Elin Nord Sæbjørnsen, Trude Fløystad Eines & Cecilie Katrine Utheim Grønvik

Abstract Many organisations offer mentoring schemes to support people leaving prison and resettle back into the community. Mentorship relationships are complex but despite this, there remains limited theoretical and/or research informed tools to guide mentorship practices and hereby the success of ex-prisoner mentorship. The aim of the paper is to contribute to this shortfall by presenting a theoretically informed framework to assist reflection on mentorship practices and the mentorship relationship: the Recognition Reflection Framework (RRF). The framework has potential to provide mentors with a tool to reflect on ex-prisoners´ need for recognition of worth if they are to desist from crime. The paper describes the theoretical development and preliminary validation of this reflection framework, underpinned by a strengths-based mentoring approach, and developed through the merger of concepts from recognition theory, person centred care and therapeutic alliances. We present this framework as a means through which mentors can reflect on how they may specifically contribute to secondary and tertiary desistance, as well as reflect on ways they can personally develop a constructive mentor-client relationship.

British Journal of Community Justice. 26/07/2023.

By Julia Laskorunsky

Kelly Lyn Mitchell and Sandy Felkey Mullins

This report examines the challenges and opportunities that states faced in deciding whether to release people from prison during the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses on the legal mechanisms available to jurisdictions and the factors that influenced whether they were willing or able to use those mechanisms to release people from prison. Our goal is to illuminate whether back-end release mechanisms can be used to reduce prison populations that have been bloated by the policies of the mass-incarceration era or whether relief from mass incarceration must take some other form. The report presents case studies of six states—Alabama, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Washington—to gain a more in-depth view of how events unfolded during the pandemic. Overall, our study found that the number of individuals released early from prisons during the pandemic was limited due to a variety of factors, including politics, risk-averse decision-making, shifting external pressures, the limited scope of compassionate and medical release statutes and the use of discretion to deny release. In addition, few changes to policy or practice that occurred during the pandemic had a lasting impact on back-end release practices. We conclude that the back-end release mechanisms offer only a modest opportunity to reduce mass incarceration, and the current system is unlikely to make a substantial difference in addressing mass incarceration due primarily to risk aversion. Instead, state-level carceral policies that focus on diffusing responsibility for back-end release and that reduce incarceration in the first place have the greatest chance of achieving long-term reductions in prison populations.

.St. Paul, MN: University of Minnesota Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, 2023. 73p.

By Kevin R. Reitz, Edward E. Rhine, Allegra Lukac, and Melanie Griffith

“Indeterminacy” is the product of uncertainty, after a judge has pronounced a prison sentence, about later official decisions that will influence the actual time served by the defendant. The uncertainty extends over many future decisions, such as good-time awards or forfeitures by prison officials and release or release-denial decisions by parole boards. To the extent these later decision patterns are unpredictable, the judge’s sentence is “indeterminate” on the day of sentencing. When prison sentences are highly indeterminate, many months or years of time-to-be-served can be unforeseeable in individual cases. The mechanics of indeterminacy in prison sentencing vary enormously from state to state, and are not well understood. In many states, time-served policy is largely administered at the “back end” of the sentencing system. If prison policy is aimed toward retribution or public safety, it is back-end officials who ultimately choose how best to achieve those goals. This raises critical questions of whether they are well-positioned to be stewards of the public interest, and whether their procedures are adequate to the task. Such questions are especially urgent in a nation with high incarceration rates. In most American jurisdictions, however, back-end decisionmaking about prison-sentence length has low visibility and is unglamorous. Very few people pay serious attention to its workings. From a systemic perspective, indeterminacy can be seen as the field of play in which back-end officials with time-served discretion exercise their powers. The larger the field—the greater the degree of indeterminacy—the greater the whole-system impact of back-end decisions. Indeterminacy builds up cumulative effects over hundreds and thousands of cases. In systems with high degrees of indeterminacy, a substantial amount of control over prison population size is located at the back end of the system. In many states, back-end officials have more to say about prison numbers than sentencing courts. Yet few people are aware of this.

Minneapolis, MN: Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, University of Minnesota, 2022. 145p.

By Ebony Ruhland , Edward E. Rhine , Jason Robey and Kelly Lyn Mitchell

The Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice launched a national survey of releasing authorities in March 2015 to each state, and the U.S. Parole Commission. The importance of the survey was underscored by an endorsement from the Association of Paroling Authorities International (APAI). We are pleased to present the results from this important survey here. This is the first comprehensive survey of parole boards completed in nearly ten years. Its findings provide a rich database for better understanding the policy and practice of paroling authorities. The last survey to be conducted of paroling authorities was in 2007 - 2008. The current report offers an expansion and update of previous surveys. The results summarized throughout the report offer a timely resource for paroling authorities, correctional policy-makers and practitioners, legislators, and those with a public policy interest in sentencing and criminal justice operations. It is our hope that the document and its findings provide key justice system and other stakeholders with an incisive snapshot of the work of paroling authorities across the country in a manner that contributes to a larger conversation about sound and effective parole release and revocation practices.

Minneapolis: Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, 2016. 56p.