Jody L. Sundt

Is Child Saving Dead? Public Support for Juvenile Rehabilitation

In recent years, the sustained criticism leveled at juvenile rehabilitation has raised the question of whether the public continues to endorse the correctional policy of saving youthful offenders. However, in a 1998 statewide survey of Tennessee residents, the respondents indicated that rehabilitation should be an integral goal of the juvenile correctional system. They also endorsed a range of community-based treatment interventions and favored early intervention programs over imprisonment as a response to crime. Taken together, these findings revealed that the publics belief in “child saving” remains firm, and that citizens do not support an exclusively punitive response to juvenile offenders.

The Effect of Drug Court Programming on Recidivism: the Cincinnati Experience:

The impetus of the drug court movement can be traced to a number of factors, such as the social and organizational costs of imprisonment and the literature surrounding the effectiveness of community-based treatment. Regardless of its origins, however, drug courts have altered the way in which court systems process drug cases and respond to drug-dependent offenders. Evaluations of U.S. drug courts are beginning to emerge, and although the outcome results are encouraging, not all courts are showing a reduction in rearrest rates. Despite the rapid expansion of drug courts, their growing prevalence, and popularity, little is known about the drug court models ability to achieve its objectives in a variety of circumstances. This research adds to the literature on drug courts by examining the effect of drug court programming on multiple indicators of recidivism. Results of the study are mixed; however, the drug court treatment group did perform better when examining arrest for a drug-related offense.

Public Tolerance for Community-Based Sanctions

Based on a factorial design survey of 237 Hamilton County (Cincinnati), Ohio, residents, we assessed not only whether respondents preferred, but also “tolerated” or viewed as acceptable, community-based sanctions. Rating vignettes in which the offender engaged in either burglary or robbery, a slight majority of the respondents favored a sentence involving incarceration. Even so, a sizable minority of the sample preferred to sanction offenders in the community, and tolerance for such a sanction was widespread. There was little support, however, for sanctions that did not involve the close supervision of the offender. We suggest that community-based sanctions will be embraced by the public only to the extent that a persuasive case can be made that the sanction punishes, restrains, and changes offenders—in short, that it “works.”

The Sociopolitical Context of Prison Violence and Its Control A Case Study of Supermax and Its Effect in Illinois

This research explores the sociopolitical context of prison violence and its control in the state of Illinois, and discusses the series of events that led to the opening of a supermax prison. Interrupted time series analyses were used to test whether the use of the supermax was associated with declines in prison violence, controlling for the potentially confounding influence of a systemwide effort to restructure the Illinois Department of Corrections following a prison scandal in 1996. There was no association between the opening of a supermax and inmate-on-inmate assaults; however, the supermax appears to have resulted in an abrupt, permanent reduction in assaults against staff. The opening of the supermax was also associated with an abrupt, permanent reduction in the use of lockdown days.

Is Downsizing Prisons Dangerous? The Effect of California’s Realignment Act on Public Safety

Research Summary Recent declines in imprisonment raise a critical question: Can prison populations be reduced without endangering the public? This question is examined by testing the effect of Californias dramatic efforts to comply with court-mandated targets to reduce prison overcrowding using a pretest-posttest design. The results showed that Californias Realignment Act had no effect on violent or property crime rates in 2012, 2013, or 2014. When crime types were disaggregated, a moderately large, statistically significant association between Realignment and auto theft rates was observed in 2012. By 2014, however, this effect had decayed and auto theft rates returned to pre-Realignment levels. Policy Implications Significant reductions in the size of prison populations are possible without endangering public safety. Within just 15 months of its passage, Realignment reduced the size of the total prison population by 27,527 inmates, prison crowding declined from 181% to 150% of design capacity, approximately

Prisons in Crisis: The American Experience

453 million was saved, and there was no adverse effect on the overall safety of Californians. With a mixture of jail use, community corrections, law enforcement and other preventive efforts, California counties have provided a comparable level of public safety to that previously achieved by state prisons. Nevertheless, sustaining these policy objectives will require greater attention to local implementation, targeted crime prevention, and sentencing reform.

Assessing Public Support for Three-Strikes-and-You're-Out Laws: Global versus Specific Attitudes

Over the past two decades, an increasingly lengthy roster of commentators has characterized prisons in the United States as being in ‘crisis’ (see, for example, Blumstein, 1989; Colvin, 1992; Cullen and Gilbert, 1982; Gottfredson and McConville, 1987; Selke, 1993; Sherman and Hawkins, 1981; Simon, 1993). The term has been invoked to describe virtually every aspect of the American correctional system, but two uses have been most prominent and will occupy our attention here.1 Most obvious and most often, commentators speak of the ‘crowding crisis’ — how escalating inmate populations tax system resources and create an unrelenting administrative nightmare. Less clearly articulated but perhaps more fundamental, there is a sense that the very purpose or ‘conscience’ (Rothman, 1980) of the correctional enterprise is up for grabs or, still worse, undergoing a disquieting transformation.