Word: petersilia
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...some states - including California, Colorado and Kentucky - have begun releasing inmates early. "The pressure in state legislatures all over the country is to bring down the populations, because we just can't afford the level of punishment that we've had the last 20 years," says Joan Petersilia, a criminologist at Stanford Law School. (Read "Experts: Street Crime Too Often Blamed on Gangs...
...cells of current inmates. Instead, they're making it harder for those who are already out on parole to return to prison. Parolees who commit minor infractions - missing a meeting with a parole officer, for instance - account for an astonishing proportion of incarceration costs. "Every year," Stanford's Petersilia told the Los Angeles Times recently, "[the state of California] sends some 70,000 parolees back to prison, about 30,000 from L.A. County alone. Most serve two to three months. Everybody knows this revolving door does not protect the public ... These are the lower-level people who may have been...
...consultant to the California Corrections and Rehabilitation Department, Joan Petersilia is also a professor of criminology at University of California Irvine and director of its Center on Evidence-Based Corrections, which is funded by the prisons department. An expert on prison reform, she offers her thoughts on how to solve the myriad problems in the nation's largest corrections system as it faces the threat of federal supervision...
TIME: People are worried that if the federal courts impose population caps there will be a wholesale release of violent offenders, endangering public safety. Are those concerns well-founded? Petersilia: If it happens, there will never be a wholesale release of violent felons to meet the caps. California will do individual risk assessments of the prison population and make decisions based on age, the inmates' prison and criminal record, and seriousness of their current crime...
...rate. But prison does at least keep criminals off the street. Home confinement cannot guarantee that security. Some data, tentative and incomplete, do suggest, however, that felons placed on intensive probation are less likely to commit crimes again than those placed on traditional probation or sent to prison. Joan Petersilia, a Rand Corp. researcher, says the recidivism rate of such offenders is impressively low, "usually less than 20%." And many keep their jobs, she adds. "That's the real glimmer of hope -- that in the long run these people will become functioning members of the community...
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