Impact of Swift and Certain Sanctions

• Author: Jacqueline Wormer,Brianne Posey,Christopher M. Campbell,Alex Kigerl,Zachary Hamilton
• Published date: 01 November 2016
• Date: 01 November 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12245

RESEARCH ARTICLE

EVALUATING OFFENDERS ON

COMMUNITY SUPERVISION

Impact of Swift and Certain Sanctions

Evaluation of Washington State’s Policy for Offenders

on Community Supervision

Zachary Hamilton

Washington State University

Christopher M. Campbell

Portland State University

Jacqueline van Wormer

Washington State University

Alex Kigerl

Washington State University

Brianne Posey

Washington State University

Research Summary

In the wake of the mass incarceration movement, many states must now manage

the rebound of decarceration. Thermodynamic forces of the justice system, however,

have pushed former fiscal pressures of institutions onto that of community corrections.

Encouraged by the positive findings of recently piloted innovations,several jurisdictions

have taken great interest in the implementation of deterrence-based sanctioning models

when dealing with supervision violations. Among the first to implement a statewide

turn to this style of sanctioning, WashingtonState’s swift-and-certain (SAC) policy was

implemented in June 2012. The intent of SAC was to expand the model found in

Hawaii’sOpportunity Probation and Enforcement (HOPE) to a wider criminal justice

Direct correspondence to Zachary Hamilton, Department of Criminal Justice & Criminology, Washington State

Institute for Criminal Justice (WSICJ), Washington State University, Spokane, WA 99210-1495 (e-mail:

zachary.hamilton@wsu.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12245 C2016 American Society of Criminology 1009

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 15 rIssue 4

Research Article Evaluating Offenders On Community Supervision

population, while emphasizing the reduction of confinement costs. This study focused

on the impact of SAC with regard to supervision outcomes for participants. By using a

quasi-experimental design, we examined confinement, recidivism, treatment,violation,

and costs outcomes of SAC participants. Findings reveal that SAC participants were

found to incur fewer sanctioned incarceration days after a violation, reduced odds of

recidivism, possessed greater treatment program utilization, reduced their propensity

of committing violations over time, and as a result, imposed lower correctional and

associated costs. The SAC model provides noteworthy positive effects and no appreciable

negative impacts on public safety.

Policy Implications

We further discuss the impact of SAC in the context of deterrence-based sanctioning.

Specifically,we explain how practices such as SAC may impact the future of sanctioning

community supervision conditions. Although many policies that emphasize deterrence

demonstrate inconsistent findings, immediate advantages of SAC take the form of fiscal

savings, indicating that these novel methods provide a form of justice reinvestment.

Additionally, connecting deterrence-based supervision methods to reductions in most

recidivism measures suggests that proportionality and quality assurancemay increase the

effectiveness of these policies. We recommend ways that such nuanced implementation

may be fruitful, as well as suggest ways of conceptualizing the theory of deterrence.

Policy makers can appropriately work its components into supervision practice without

depreciating the importance of treatment and addressing criminogenic needs.

Keywords

recidivism, violation, deterrence, supervision, repeated measures

During the last two decades, a large body of research has demonstrated how

punitive policies have led to substantial costs, both fiscally and socially (e.g.,

Clear, 2007; Schmitt, Warner, and Gupta, 2010). Many states have realized

that increases in spending on institutional corrections have yielded remarkably little in the

way of reducing recidivism and, instead, have triggered additional social costs (Blumstein

and Wallman, 2006; Clear, 2007; McNiel, Binder, and Robinson, 2005; Travis and Waul,

2004; Zimring and Hawkins, 1997). Embedded in this realization have been state efforts

in decarceration (Barker, 2011), which may be understood as a thermodynamic rebound of

mass incarceration (see Wright and Rosky, 2011). As systems aim to relieve practical and

fiscal pressures of institutional corrections (e.g., Austin and Fabelo, 2004; Engel, Larivee,

and Luedeman, 2009; Richards, Austin, and Jones, 2004; Schmitt et al., 2010), those same

pressures may be transferred to community corrections settings rather than being resolved.

Reduced budgets and fewer resources coupled with the supervision of now more than

5 million people have yielded many unforeseen problems in community corrections (e.g.,

1010 Criminology & Public Policy

Hamilton et al.

supervision caseloads; Pew Center on the States [PEW], 2009). Such problems have driven

some officials to seek solutions through system reassessment, which are meant to ensure that

resources are being placed into cost-effective and evidence-based supervision practices (e.g.,

Guevara and Solomon, 2009; Hamilton, van Wormer, Campbell, and Posey, 2015; Rempel,

2014; Taxmanand Belenko, 2012). Within this context, one major policy shift that arose to

become a national movement is the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI). By emphasizing

the strategic placement of finite resources, JRI includes the redistribution of monies from

obsolete correctional practices into more effective modes of offender reformation (Clear,

2011; LaVigne et al., 2014).

Nevertheless, where this reinvestment is often necessarily focused towardincreasing the

opportunities for offender-change programming, larger, morefundamental issues tend to go

unaddressed. A particularly large issue surrounds the sanctioning of those who technically

violate their terms of supervision and may be perpetually returned to confinement. A sub-

stantial portion of the dramatic increase in incarceration over the past two decades has been

linked to difficulties related to confinement-based sanctioning for such violations (Grattet,

Petersilia, Lin, and Beckman, 2009; Maruschak and Bonczar, 2013). Some scholars have

attributed much of this problem to the systematic processes of increasing the supervision

intensity (e.g., Blumstein and Beck, 2005; Petersilia, 2009; Visher and Travis, 2003) and

“stacking”1additional conditions for violators (Blomberg and Lucken, 1994; Kleis, 2010;

Marciniak, 2000). Such arguments often have involved criticism of overzealouspolicies that

govern supervision practices, stating that increased intensity in both supervision and sanc-

tions leads to an unnecessary crackdown on violating behavior (e.g., Petersilia and Turner,

1993; Taxman, 2012).

These more traditional methods are most commonly associated with using confinement

as a sanction. Typically, these practices involve a question of how frequent and howlong the

violators are confined. On the whole, confinement has yielded several problematic outcomes

such as adding to offenders’ criminogenic factors (Bales and Piquero, 2011; Nagin, Cullen,

and Jonson, 2009) and being associated with iatrogenic effects among offenders on postre-

lease supervision (Campbell, 2015; Drake and Aos, 2012). As a result of the potentially

misplaced intensity of supervision, problems arise relating to the consistency and propor-

tionality violators receive, where ideally, supervision practices and the use of confinement

should take on a role more similar to that found in behavioral conditioning and deterrence

theories (e.g., Hawken, 2010). Such conditioning and deterrence approaches have been the

1. The term

stacking

is used here to denote the process by which community supervision officers

catalogue multiple counts of violations over time and then request sanctioning for the group

simultaneously. For example, if an offender violates by way of a positive urine analysis in his or her first

month, being late for a community corrections officer (CCO) visit in month two, and being identified as

living in an unauthorized area in month three, the CCO may request a sanction for all three violations

and a judge may administer three times the sanction duration than would be expected for a single

violation.

Volume 15 rIssue 4 1011