Community Corrections as a Social Service
With around 2 million Americans incarcerated in the nation's prisons and jails at a cost of tens of billions of dollars each year, policymakers are scrambling for alternative solutions and many have identified community corrections as a viable option. Using parole and probations programs, community corrections provide a valuable social service to the country by giving juvenile and adult offenders the opportunity to rejoin mainstream society in meaningful and productive ways that reduce recidivism rates and restore the integrity of the family unit. This paper reviews the relevant literature concerning these programs to demonstrate that community corrections represents an important social service that should be expanded to reduce prison and jail overcrowding rates and provide offenders with the chance they need to rebuild their lives. Finally, a summary of the research and important findings concerning community corrections as a social service are presented in the conclusion.
Literature Review
While many Americans believe that community corrections programs are a fairly recent innovation, they actually date back to 1841 when the principles of John Augustus, "the father of probation," were first implemented in England and subsequently in the United States (Waters, 2003). Achieving definitional clarity with respect to community corrections, though, has been challenging for criminal justice practitioners, with some making the point only that, "Community corrections is not incarceration" however, it is also clear that "there are many programs providing more structured residential services that are more like traditional incarceration" (Evans, 1996, p. 124). Regardless of their specific format, though, community corrections programs are the most commonly used alternative for supervising most offenders who are released into some type of correctional supervision in the...
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