
Probation and parole, as alternatives to a brutal penal system, fail American communities and cost taxpayers billions. According to the opinion of a former commissioner of the New York City Departments of Probation and Correction, new alternatives of probation and parole require consideration.
“Our national system of supervised parole and probation is a failure, and it’s past time to rethink it,” opined ex-commissioner Vincent Schiraldi in a Washington Post op-ed. Schiraldi authored “Mass Supervision: Probation, Parole, and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom.”
“Probation (a front-end sentence intended as an alternative to incarceration) and parole (early release from prison for good behavior) have been around since the 1800s,” Schiraldi wrote, but called both systems unsuccessful as alternatives to incarceration and rehabilitation. In the op-ed, Schiraldi advocated for alternative methods of rehabilitative and safer incarceration to increase public safety.
Schiraldi’s op-ed asserted that between 1980 and 2008, a five-fold increase for parolees and probationers led to more than five million persons under community supervision and the current community supervision of almost four million persons.
In Schiraldi’s opinion, probation and parole turned to a “trail ‘em, nail ‘em, and jail ‘em” tactic, that “ushered in a mushrooming of hard-to-meet supervision conditions and imprisonment for noncriminal supervision violations.”
Nearly 25% of the incarcerated population went to state prisons not a new offense but for technical violations of their supervision, he said, and community supervision costs taxpayers $2.8 billion annually. “States with more parolees actually had more, not less, crime,” wrote Schiraldi.
“Supervision’s hammer also lands most heavily on young Black men,” Schiraldi believed, alleging, “These young men are more likely to be imprisoned for technical violations because of bias,” and because they live in economic conditions that leave them without jobs, stable housing, and reliable transportation.
Schiraldi cited the 2012 case of Thomas Barrett, who returned to incarceration after he could not pay private probation fees. Barrett suffered destitution so severe that he had to sell his blood to make payments.
“My colleagues and I analyzed nearly 40 years of data from all 50 states and discovered that ‘mass supervision’ has failed to achieve its two primary goals: reducing incarceration and improving public safety,” Schiraldi’s op-ed boldly asserts.
Less supervision would mean lower cost, Schiraldi’s op-ed concluded. In his opinion, “for some groups, eliminating probation and parole supervision, replacing them with services offered by nonprofit and volunteer groups, and carefully studying the outcomes,” would make sense.
Schiraldi’s op-ed said, “After nearly two centuries, probation and parole have failed to prove their worth. Let’s carefully experiment with, and assiduously study, the alternatives instead.”