When departments of corrections target services to people who are incarcerated, these services can help reduce the likelihood that those individuals will engage in criminal activity when released. Too often, however, criminal justice agencies lack the information they need to know whether the programs they offer to inmates are effective. In Iowa, corrections leaders have pursued an innovative approach that allows the best available research to guide their choices.

COMMUNITY CORRECTIONS IS in the early stages of its renaissance. Reawakened from the late 1970s through the 1990s of “nothing works” and zero tolerance for violators, and driven by political consensus that mass incarceration is a failed criminal justice response, community corrections is on a path of rediscovery and new learning.

A federal district court ordered the Missouri Department of Corrections (MDOC) and its contracted healthcare provider, Corizon LLC, to immediately provide Jessica Hicklin, a 38-year-old transgender woman incarcerated at the Potosi Correctional Center in Mineral Point, with care that her doctors deem to be medically necessary treatment for her gender dysphoria, including hormone therapy, access to permanent body hair removal, and access to gender-affirming canteen items.

By Adam Gelb

The Executive Session on Community Corrections has released a new paper entitled You Get What You Measure: New Performance Indicators Needed to Gauge Progress of Criminal Justice Reform.

Jurisdictions across the U.S. are engaging in efforts to reform sentencing and corrections policies, with an aim of shrinking the footprint of the criminal justice system. As these reforms unfold, the makeup of correctional populations is shifting, both for facilities and for probation and parole agencies.

Assessing and targeting criminal justice reforms requires an up-to-date view of the number of people in state and federal prisons. The Bureau of Justice Statistics collects this data, but their reports lag prison populations by a year or more.

(Published May 17, 2018) The publication The Criminal History of Federal Offenders provides for the first time complete information on the number of convictions and types of offenses in the criminal histories of federal offenders sentenced in a fiscal year.

“Ban the Box” (BTB) policies restrict employers from asking about applicants’ criminal histories on job applications and are often presented as a means of reducing unemployment among black men, who disproportionately have criminal records. However, withholding information about criminal records could risk encouraging racial discrimination: employers may make assumptions about criminality based on the applicant's race.

In March, The Texas Criminal Justice Coalition released a report, A Growing Population: The Surge of Women into Texas’ Criminal Justice System, which examines the growing number of women entering Texas’ criminal justice system and offers recommendations for safely reducing this population and helping women thrive in the community.

This report delivers the evidence and rationale for two interdependent approaches. First, it calls for reducing the size of the probation population dramatically by diverting far more youth from the juvenile justice system to community resources. Second, it seeks to transforming probation into a more effective intervention for the much smaller population of youth who will remain on probation officer’s caseloads.