By Joe Russo, George B. Drake, John S. Shaffer, Brian A. Jackson
There is a great deal of public dissatisfaction with the status quo in the U.S. criminal justice system (Mizell, 2014). At a time when crime has been decreasing nationally, correctional costs have expanded rapidly to the detriment of other vital public services (Mitchell and Leachman, 2014). Policies initiated during the “tough-on-crime” era—such as the war on drugs, mandatory sentencing, and habitual offender laws—that have focused on incarceration have driven significant increases in the correctional population (National Research Council, 2014). The result of this history is a corrections sector—agencies that manage offenders confined in prisons and jails and those released into the community on probation and parole—where there is widespread concern about both cost and the sector’s ability to achieve its goals (Justice Policy Institute, 2013; National Research Council, 2014).
The corrections sector is one of the three central components of the criminal justice system, along with the police and the courts; however, it has been the major focal point for reform because the consequences of current policy approaches are most apparent at the end of the process (Breitenbach, 2016).