These efforts spotlight the hundreds
of thousands of people who are jailed each year for behavior that
would be routine if they weren’t on probation or parole.
Research has long called into question the public safety benefits of locking
them up, and other traditional probation and parole tactics. Now social
distancing orders to slow the virus are providing a way to test some changes
critics have advocated. Fifty reform-minded probation and parole chiefs last week called
for states and counties to “suspend or severely limit” jailing people
for supervision violations that aren’t crimes, among other changes, in response
to COVID-19.
One of them was Brian Lovins, president-elect of the
American Probation and Parole Association. “This gives us a big opportunity to
challenge the need for incarceration for non-violent folks,” he said.
With government buildings closed across the country,
check-ins at parole and probation offices are all but suspended nationwide.
Many departments are doing drug
testing only in the most high-risk cases, according
to a small New York University survey and interviews with people in
the probation and parole field, known as “community corrections.” And with
jails overcrowded and courthouses shuttered, some departments have stopped
making arrests for breaking the rules of supervision—known as “technical
violations”—unless there’s an imminent safety threat. Some places have formally
ordered officers to stop bringing people to jail for technical violations. In
others, fewer home visits and check-ins mean fewer opportunities for officers
to discover broken rules.
To be sure, dialing back close pre- or post-release
supervision is not without risk. Around the country, officers are using video
and phone calls to keep in touch with people they supervise, but they lose some
nuance and personal connection when they’re no longer in people’s living rooms,
observing family dynamics, or visiting workplaces and having informal chats
with whoever manages the person there, probation and parole professionals said
in interviews.
Susan Rice, the chief probation officer in Miami
County, Indiana, sees this time as a “big social experiment.”
“We all think we have to supervise these people and be
drug testing them constantly and following them around. If we stop doing that,
do they fall apart? Get rearrested? Overdose? Will it really happen or will we
see that they’re fine?” she said.
Originally designed as an alternative to
incarceration, probation and parole have instead become “a significant
contributor to mass incarceration,” according
to a 2017 Columbia University Justice Lab statement signed by more than 60
prosecutors and community corrections directors across the country. On any
given day, supervision violations account for almost a quarter of people in
prison nationwide—about 280,000 people—according to an
analysis by the Council of State Governments’ Justice Center.
“This is what the research has been saying: just leave
them alone,” says a probation chief in the upper Midwest, who asked not to be
named so his staff don’t feel he is criticizing their usual practice. Even
before the coronavirus crisis, his office had been trying to implement probation
“dosing”—tailoring their support to the person’s risk and needs, as opposed
to a one-size-fits-all approach.
“We probably still over-supervise when we don’t even
intend to,” he said. With the current suspension, “I think there will be some
‘ahas’ coming out of that.”
Late last month, a Georgia man who’d recently had a
double lung transplant was set to serve a year in prison for a probation
violation, according to Michael Nail, the state’s commissioner of community
supervision. “That’s the last person you want to be going into the prison
system” under the threat of COVID-19, Nail said. Nail said he got a call from a
local sheriff, who was anxious to have the man out of his jail but couldn’t get
the prison system to take him. With a judge’s help, they arranged to have the
man released on time served.
“There’s nothing out there that shows a specific
amount of time in custody is the magic number” to address violations, Nail
said. Coronavirus precautions are “an opportunity to educate folks on what the
research shows.”
The pandemic has also suspended some of the social
supports that are both lifeline and requirement for many on probation and
parole, including Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings, appointments
with counselors and therapy groups. Some of those have been temporarily
replaced by telehealth or video conferences. One probation officer in
Westchester County, New York, said she spends her days on the phone, scrambling
to help people sign up for unemployment or log in to virtual appointments. She
asked The Marshall Project to withhold her name because, like several of the
officers interviewed, she was not authorized to speak with a reporter.
Meanwhile, probation and parole caseloads are likely to
rise in coming weeks as prisons and jails look for ways to reduce overcrowding.
This week California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the
state intends to release 3,500 prisoners to parole earlier than planned.
“We’re all kind of freaked out,” said a Missouri
probation officer whose caseload is exclusively people with sex-offense
convictions. Her
state’s pandemic protocol calls for “high and very high risk” clients
to be seen face-to-face just once per month; all others check in by phone.
“Anyone that’s been around knows they can drug all they want, they can not
report, they can abscond, and they’re not going back to prison right now,” she
said.
But others say the rules were too strict to begin
with.
One man on parole in New York said that when he heard officers
were not issuing technical violations, he decided to fly out of state for a
night to meet his newborn granddaughter. He asked not to be named because he
was discussing a parole violation. He had only been out a few weeks after
serving decades in prison, but decided to take the chance because he was afraid
that once the usual protocols are back it will be years before he may get a
travel pass, he said.
“I'm not going to follow all of their rules and then
catch the virus—anything could happen—and then I die and I never met my
granddaughter,” he said.
So far, crime
appears to be on the decline in some cities, even with a
coronavirus-related rollback in nonessential policing, according to an analysis
by The Marshall Project. Some of the decline can certainly be attributed to
people hunkering down at home and other social distancing steps. But the
numbers, although not yet conclusive, may provide reassurance to those
who fear that releasing people from jail and easing supervision will
lead to more crime.
In Massachusetts, the court has scaled back the number
of people placed on electronic monitoring to limit the interpersonal
interaction required to have the device fitted as well as non-serious
violations that result from the devices, said Edward Dolan, the state’s
probation chief. Massachusetts is only putting ankle bracelets on people for
whom the state “couldn’t figure out a way not to do it.” This includes those
convicted of stalking or domestic violence, Dolan said.
It shows how the coronavirus pandemic is forcing the
justice system to “adjust its risk threshold,” Dolan said.
“It’s really a balancing between the impact of the
pandemic, and what we’re willing to collectively tolerate as risk in the
community.”
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