Phelps Michelle S, Dickens H N, De Andre T Beadle
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN, USA.
Socius. 2023 Jan-Dec;9. doi: 10.1177/23780231221148631. Epub 2023 Jan 12.
Advocates for reform have highlighted violations of probation and parole conditions as a key driver of mass incarceration. As a 2019 Council of State Governments report declared, supervision violations are "filling prisons and burdening budgets." Yet few scholarly accounts estimate the precise role of technical violations in fueling prison populations during the prison boom. Using national surveys of state prison populations from 1979 to 2016, the authors document that most incarcerated persons are behind bars for new sentences. On average, just one in eight people in state prisons on any given day has been locked up for a technical violation of community supervision alone. Thus, strategies to substantially reduce prison populations must look to new criminal offenses and sentence length.
改革倡导者强调违反缓刑和假释条件是大规模监禁的关键驱动因素。正如2019年州政府理事会的一份报告所宣称的，监管违规行为“使监狱人满为患，给预算带来负担”。然而，在监狱数量激增期间，很少有学术研究估计技术性违规行为在增加监狱人口方面的确切作用。作者利用1979年至2016年对州监狱人口的全国性调查记录显示，大多数被监禁者是因新的判决而入狱的。平均而言，在任何一天，州监狱中每八个人中只有一个人仅仅因为技术性违反社区监管规定而被关押。因此，大幅减少监狱人口的策略必须着眼于新的刑事犯罪和刑期长度。
