Ronald Fraser: Pa.’s parole & probation merry-go-round

State-run parole and probation programs are designed to keep people convicted of crimes — including a large number of nonviolent crimes — out of prison. But in Pennsylvania, according to a recent Council of State Governments study, “Confined and Costly: How Supervision Violations are Filling Prisons,” “On any given day 7,443 people (or 16% of the 2018 Pennsylvania prison population) are behind bars as a result of a probation or parole violation, at an annual cost to the state of $334 million.”

Parole and probation are court-ordered, non-prison sentences that give offenders a chance to rebuild their lives in a community setting. Not a get-out-of-jail-free card, parole and probation sentences require offenders to follow a strictly supervised list of conditions that commonly includes mandatory drug testing, keeping regular parole officer visits, paying fines and restitution, holding a job, and drug rehab and anger management classes.

Each year, about one-quarter of all people under community supervision successfully complete the terms of their parole and probation and are released. What about the others, many of whom struggle with mental illness or addiction, low education attainment, poor employment skills, and an inability to pay for drug testing or administrative and electronic monitoring fees? (Yes, many parolees are required to pay these fees themselves.)

For them, repeated violations of even relatively minor rules can lead to a disciplinary hearing, additional restrictions, or a ride on the probation and parole-to-prison merry-go-round. In fact, the Council of State Government’s report found that 54% of all people admitted to Pennsylvania prisons in 2017 were placed behind bars for parole or probation violations, including conviction of new offenses.

But sooner or later these back-to-prison inmates will return on parole once again with a new set of supervised restrictions to deal with.

The size of Pennsylvania’s merry-go-round is staggering. For the years 2014-17, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, prison admissions totaled 79,820. During this four-year period, it is likely that as many as 19,000 men and women (25% x 79,820) were returned to prison not for breaking any law but for violating their parole and probation rules.

If Pennsylvania’s parole and probation programs had worked as intended during 2014-17, thousands of offenders would not have been locked behind bars but would have remained under community supervision — where they could work on putting their lives back together. That would have dramatically lowered the state’s prison population and saved Pennsylvania taxpayers about $44,000 a year for each inmate remaining out of prison. How might this happen?

A 2018 report from the PEW Charitable Trusts titled “Probation and Parole Systems Marked by High Stakes, Missed Opportunities,” found that one in 55 adults nationally — and one of every 35 Pennsylvania adults — is on probation or parole. The report also found that many states are working to strengthen the effectiveness of their probation and parole programs.

“Policymakers across the nation,” the authors write, “are adopting reforms, such as shorter supervision terms and earned compliance credits, and to prioritize supervision and treatment resources for higher-risk individuals while removing lower-risk people from supervision caseloads.”

In practice, this requires that states “fundamentally change the purpose of supervision from punishing failure to promoting success. The goal should be to help people repair the harm they have caused and become self-sufficient, law-abiding citizens, rather than simply enforcing rules set by courts and parole boards, catching violators and imposing penalties, including incarceration.”

As these reforms are put into practice, prison populations will go down, state taxes will go down and, best of all, thousands of Pennsylvanians will stand a better chance of putting prison life behind them for good.

Ronald Fraser writes on public policy issues for the DKT Liberty Project (dktlibertyproject.org).