Making Criminals Pay.

• Author: WORTH, ROBERT
• Position: Service programs for convicted criminals

How the courts can cut crime and save money

At 7 A.M. on a frosty Saturday morning in Morristown, N.J., men and women gather in a parking lot across from the train station and stand huddled alongside two vans marked "SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT." Most are young, a few are middle-aged; all have a hang-dog look. All of them have been convicted of larceny, drunk driving, and other nonviolent offenses, including failure to pay fines imposed as part of a criminal sentence. All have been sentenced to jail, and given the option of serving their jail time on weekends through sheriff-supervised community service, under a program called SLAP, for Sheriff's Labor Assistance Program. At 7:30 sharp, they will get into the vans, where they will don orange jerseys with "SLAP" blazoned across the front. Men from the sheriff's department will drive them to sites all over the county to pick up trash, repaint buildings, clean up parks, and sometimes even do skilled labor such as carpentry and roofing, if they're qualified and if local organized labor groups don't object.

Under ordinary circumstances, these people would in all likelihood be either thrown in jail or let off scot free. In most cases they deserve neither. The two major criminal sanctions short of imprisonment--fines and unsupervised community service--are enforced haphazardly at best. For every dollar the courts impose in criminal fines, they collect (on average) less than a dime, despite the fact that much of this money is slated to reimburse victims. As for community service, "it's a fraud," as one former judge told me. "They can't really enforce it, so they write it off."

During the past two decades, as the U.S. prison population has exploded, the number of people on probation--those who have been convicted of crimes and given sentences other than jail--has grown even faster. There are now over 1.7 million people in jails and prisons in the United States, and roughly three times as many on probation. According to a survey published in 1992 by Patrick Langan of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, about half of all probationers did not comply with the terms of their probation, and only one-fifth of violators ever went to jail for their noncompliance. This means over two million convicted criminals are ignoring their "punishment" and getting away with it. You don't have to be James Q. Wilson to see that this kind of neglect sends a dangerous signal to more serious criminals.

SLAP is one of a new breed of efforts to put the teeth back into probation. Unlike a prison sentence. SLAP allows offenders to keep their jobs and maintain their families. But unlike fines or court-ordered community service, which are routinely ignored with impunity, SLAP has a bite. If you fail to show up on Saturday morning, you go directly to jail with no hearing, because you've already been sentenced. No court dates, no fruitless haggling with judges and probation officers. "We make it real simple for them," says Dan Coburn, the retired Superior Court judge who created the program in 1986. He counts five on his fingers as he speaks: "NO SHOW, IN YOU GO."

When SLAP was first introduced in Morris County, New Jersey, in 1986, some local blacks got angry, because it evoked ugly associations with chain gangs down south. "Then these black mothers started to realize their sons could go to jail instead," says Coburn. "Next thing you know, they're all asking for their kids to be on SLAP." Most of the people I spoke with at the Morristown projects, known as The Hollow, confirmed his account. "It helps you stay out of jail," said one sore-faced young man named Gerard, who works at a local dairy-pack plant. "And it allows you to pay fines. How you gonna pay fines if you can't work?"

At the same time, there's no question that SLAP makes good use of one of the oldest principles of punishment: public shaming. "A lot of people don't like SLAP because it embarasses them," said Sarah Garnet, a middle-aged black woman who lives in The Hollow. When I repeated that comment to another local woman, she replied, "They've messed it up so let them clean it up. And if they don't want to be seen in those orange jumpsuits, don't do the crime!"

So far, it seems to be working. The recidivism rate of SLAP participants has decreased significantly, and their rate of compliance with court-ordered payments has shot up. It has eased jail overcrowding everywhere it's been used, and saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in incarceration costs. (A day in a New Jersey jail costs the state $75; a day of SLAP costs about one tenth that amount). "It has taken a lot of administrative responsibility off the municipal court," says Bob Gold, a municipal court judge in Mount Olive, N.J. "Individuals who ignore probation, fines, or community service would ordinarily have to come back to me. SLAP takes care of itself and cuts down on bureaucracy. There's a lot of trickle-down in this. The more people in law enforcement understand that, the more it's going to spread."

Scarecrows

Dan Coburn, the creator of SLAP, has spent over a decade trying to transform what the courts call "conditions of probation"--fines and community service--into a...