NJ Program For Parole Violators
New Jersey has a special program intended to divert low-risk parolees away from jail and back into society, according to NJ.com.
State Parole Board officials say it’s the first of its kind in the nation. “We have to take full credit for this one,” said Director of Community Programs Lenny Ward. “This is a New Jersey initiative.”
The idea is to take technical parole violators — people who haven’t committed a new crime but may have failed a drug test or missed a meeting — and house them for 15 to 30 days at secure facilities run by a private company, Community Education Centers, in Newark or Trenton. Officials hope the program, which can house 45 parole violators at a time, will help the state avoid $14 million in incarceration costs in the coming budget year. In New Jersey, the overwhelming majority of parolees returning to prison each year — about 85 percent of almost 3,000 — committed technical violations, not new crimes. Lowering that number would help take a bite out of prison overcrowding at a time when state prisons have about 5,500 more inmates than what they were designed for …
Jeff Mellow, professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said that [economics are] changing how people view minor parole violations. “There has been a shift across the country due to the high costs of incarcerations, prison overcrowding, and a new emphasis on rehabilitation that makes us rethink this whole notion of ‘zero tolerance,’” Mellow said. “Everyone is realizing that they can no longer incarcerate their way out of this problem.”
For several years, New Jersey has used a system of “graduated sanctions,” in which parole officers have more options than simply returning their offenders to prison. Parolees who have not committed a new crime can receive increased supervision, electronic monitoring or substance abuse treatment. As a result, the number of technical violators returning to prison dropped 37 percent from 2001 to 2008. The Residential Assessment Centers, which opened last summer, use the same concept …
That doesn’t mean the program is cheap. The state has already spent $4.51 million on it and is expected to fork over another $3.786 million in the budget year that begins July 1. But parole officials say that money will pay dividends, as more parolees receive the attention they need to get their lives back on track. “Every day that the person is not in county jail or in a state prison, New Jersey basically saves money,” Ward said.
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