CALIFORNIA'S CORRECTIONAL SYSTEM

California's Correctional System

Abstract

A major theme in the recommendations of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice (hereinafter referred to as the National Crime Commission) was that the nation's correctional services should place a much greater emphasis upon community-based treatment of offenders. It was asserted that the line between institutional and community treatment should be blurred by releasing offenders on work furloughs and educational levels and by developing halfway facilities designed to allow for resumption of community responsibilities in a gradual and closely supervised fashion. Probation and parole should be greatly increased and strengthened, according to the Commission. The findings upon which these recommendations were based concerned both the gross inadequacy of the present correctional system and the promising results of recent experiments in expanded and intensified community treatment.

California's Correctional System

Community-based correctional Settings

Community-based correction programs started in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s in California. The programs offer an alternate to incarceration inside the jail system. Many criminologists accepted a important number of lawbreakers did not require incarceration in high security jail cells. Some inmates, who might else have been prepared to turn away from a life of misdeed, rather than became like the hardened lawless individuals they affiliated with in prison. In answer, states, shires, and towns established localized correctional amenities and programs that became renowned as community-based corrections. These amenities, established in neighborhoods, permitted lawbreakers usual family connections and friendships as well as rehabilitation services for example therapy, direction in rudimentary dwelling abilities, how to request for occupations, and work teaching and placement (Blumstein, 1995).

At the starting of the twenty-first 100 years, the fastest increasing assembly in jail and prison community was women. According to the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 91,612 women in state and government jails at the end of 2000, or 6.6 per hundred of the nation's total jail population. Ten times that numerous or about 900,000 were on probation or parole. Back in 1970 there were just 5,600 incarcerated women, 12,300 in 1980, and in 1990 roughly 40,000. From 1990 until the end of 2000 the number of imprisoned women increased by 125 percent. Eighty-five per hundred of women prisoners pledged nonviolent misdeeds, mostly pharmaceutical infringements and theft. The astounding boost in the number of incarcerated women in the 1990s was mostly due to pharmaceutical arrests. In the early 1980s government and state authorities started ...