SJC Exchange Library

As you know (and as the Prison Policy Initiative explained in a report earlier this month), every U.S. state puts far more people under community supervision than is remotely necessary, extending mass incarceration into (mostly poor and Black) communities. While radical reforms to supervision are warranted, a handful of reforms have the potential to quickly shrink the number of people under supervision and even to release significant numbers of people from incarceration.

The Prison Policy Initiative and the Katal Center for Equity, Health and Justice released a report called Excessive, Unjust, and Expensive: Fixing Connecticut's Probation and Parole Problems that lays out this winnable, high-impact reform package - one that could be replicated in many other states.

They published this report to support advocates on the ground in Connecticut who, at this moment, are pushing lawmakers to implement a reform package that could make the state's parole and probation systems significantly fairer. Advocates working to implement similar reforms in other states may find our report helpful as they marshal arguments in support of change.

Their report recommends that states - like Connecticut - that want to implement these reforms take the following steps:

1. Restrict the use of incarceration as a punishment for technical violations of probation and parole.
2. Replace automatic incarceration for alleged violations with a written notice to appear in court.
3. Apply earned-time credit to supervision sentences, allowing people to shorten their supervision sentences with good behavior.
4. Bolster due process.

The report explains the impact that these reforms stand to make in Connecticut, including releasing hundreds of people from incarceration immediately and preventing at least 6,000 arrests over the next two years.

The report also includes a section explaining the significant benefits New York State has seen from implementing similar reforms through its Less Is More Act, illustrating the potential gains for other states considering reforms:

• In just the first few months after its enactment, Less Is More led to nearly 2,000 people on parole who had been incarcerated for noncriminal technical violations being released from jails and prisons.
• New York was able to close six state prisons in 2021, partly because lawmakers (accurately) anticipated a drop in incarceration due to fewer people being incarcerated for technical violations.
• In less than two years, Less Is More cut the state parole population by 40% by allowing people on supervision who had followed the rules to earn time credits that led to their discharge.

All too often, we argue, people on probation or parole have their lives disrupted by allegations of misbehavior, leading to lost jobs, lost housing, and broken or strained family ties. Many of these individuals should not have even been under supervision in the first place. And because incarceration is expensive, taxpayers are paying a heavy price for a system that doles out punishment much more than it offers support. Excessive, Unjust and Expensive lays out a path to reining in these draconian and costly aspects of supervision, proposing policies that could immediately impact thousands of people in Connecticut - or virtually any other state.

The full report is here: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/ct_supervision.html