Communique — Documents — Home

Benefits of the Intermediate Sanctions Approach

—Peggy McGarry, Senior Associate, Center for Effective Public Policy. Ms. McGarry is project director of the National Intermediate Sanctions Project, sponsored by the National Institute of Corrections and the State Justice Institute. This project was established in 1989 to provide teams of State and local policymakers with training and technical assistance on how to develop appropriate, policy-driven intermediate sanctions.

In most jurisdictions, the interest in intermediate sanctions is driven by profound dissatisfaction with the outcomes of most existing sanctions, including prison, jail, and probation-particularly in light of their cost. The specific outcomes that jurisdictions desire may vary, but the frustration about current options is widely shared. Criminal justice system policymakers-whether they are judges or prosecutors, law enforcement or corrections officials-want the ability to respond appropriately to the diversity of offenses and types of offenders coming through that system.

Why intermediate sanctions?

Dissatisfaction with current outcomes is probably most profound in those cases that involve drug- and alcohol-abusing offenders. Even the less serious crimes that these offenders typically commit-burglary, robbery, purse-snatching, small-scale drug sales-induce fear beyond their actual level of harm and are ruinous to a community's sense of itself.

For policymakers, however, the greatest dismay is that the intervention of the criminal justice system seems to have little or no effect on re-offending: the same offenders reappear time after time. Judges in particular feel that their hands are tied in these cases. In some jurisdictions, the sentencing laws require a mandatory minimum term of incarceration, while, in others, judges must sentence offenders to a term of meaningless (in their eyes) supervision through probation. Neither response seems to affect behavior. At the same time, the costs of prison, jail, and probation are draining the coffers of State and local governments at a growing rate.

Many policymakers have responded to the growing numbers of repeat substance-abusing offenders in their systems, and to their own frustration, by calling for the creation of new programs, so-called intermediate sanctions, in their jurisdictions. By creating a new array of sanctioning options, they hope:

• To make sentencing more just and effective for offenders
• To enhance public safety
• To contain growth in prison and jail populations
• To reduce costs

The pitfall for these new efforts is that unless policymakers understand why they are so dissatisfied with current sanctions, efforts now underway will simply add to that frustration while in no way addressing the underlying problem. The fact is that, in jurisdiction after jurisdiction, public and private agencies have already created a wide variety of programs and options for use at sentencing.

Many agencies have already expanded their capability to manage offenders safely and to treat them effectively in the community. Many agencies are making use of the technologies now available for assessment and supervision, the new methods of intervention and treatment, and the increased understanding of population targeting. Yet the search goes on for new approaches that will make that long-awaited difference in sentencing.

Why current systems fail

The underlying difficulty facing existing programs is that no program or sentencing option can achieve its full potential for effectiveness if it has the wrong population, nor will it be seen as successful if its purpose is misunderstood. The national Intermediate Sanctions Project has found that it is not the programs, in their number or their inventiveness, that have produced such ineffective and frustrating results. Rather, it is the failure of the systems that surround these programs to behave as a system.

That failure takes a number of forms:

• A lack of communication among the key actors and agencies (judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, probation and corrections agencies) about both the capabilities and the limitations of sentencing options
• The absence of any agreement on specific populations for which the programs are best suited and the outcomes they are best able to produce (for example, one program or intervention may be quite effective with younger offenders but useless with an older population, while another program might work well to monitor offender behavior but offer no rehabilitative benefits)
• A lack of information about the sentencing process (how and when decisions are made and by whom)
• A lack of hard data about the offenders who come through the system
• Most importantly, the absence of an articulated mission for the entire sanctioning process

Development of policy-the key to success

The key to successfully overcoming the past failure of criminal justice systems in this regard is for key system actors to come together to develop policy regarding sentencing and sanctions. It is in the process of developing policy that the criminal justice system behaves as a system. The policymaking process requires that the entire system articulate desired goals and outcomes for their efforts, gather and use information to support choices among options, examine and reexamine how well chosen options are doing at meeting the intended goals, and hold themselves accountable as a unified enterprise.

How to create a sanctions system

The difficulty for many jurisdictions is that "intermediate sanctions" is used to refer both (1) to specific sanctioning options or programs, and (2) to the overall concept of a graduated range of sentencing choices that are guided by articulated policy.

Creating intermediate sanctions requires developing both a range of sanctioning options and a coherent policy to guide their use. That policy should be developed by those actors whose decisions will determine the use of the sanctions: judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, probation agencies, legislators, and others.

The sanctioning options can be whatever the policymakers of a jurisdiction decide that they need and can afford in order to meet their goals for their offender population. A number of potential options are listed in the list below.

A flexible approach for judges

In most cases, a judge imposes one or more options as a condition of a probation sentence. In some jurisdictions, a sentence of a term of probation permits the probation agency to use a number of these options as part of its supervision or to enforce supervision requirements. In other jurisdictions, the judge must specify the sanctions as conditions of the sentence.

Under the most ideal conditions, a judge decides the particular goals that he or she wants for the individual and crafts a combination of options that achieve them. For example, a judge might want to fashion a sentence for a sex offender that would combine rehabilitation with incapacitation. The judge might therefore order a term in a residential treatment program, to be followed by outpatient treatment combined with curfews and other limitations on movement in the community with supervision provided by a probation officer.

What judges want

This is exactly the approach that many judges are desperately seeking for alcohol/other drug offenders. They want to be able to respond to both the criminal behavior and the underlying addiction. They want to have at their disposal an array of options that will allow them to do that. In order for this flexible approach to work, however, judges need certain kind of support, including good programs and education about those programs. In addition, they must be part of a process that builds:

• Cooperation and shared understanding with prosecutors and their fellow judges
• Cooperation and help from probation officers who do presentence reports and recommendations
• Shared understanding and assistance from local legislators, who typically provide the funding.

Last Updated