Strengthen Community Corrections

During 2008, the Public Safety Performance Project brought together leading policy makers, practitioners and researchers to review a wide range of strategies to improve community corrections. The goal was to identify those with the greatest promise to cut crime and state corrections costs.

This “Policy Framework to Strengthen Community Corrections” is the result of those discussions. It offers state policy makers a menu of five provisions that help corrections agencies implement “evidence-based practices” by providing fiscal incentives, clearing obstacles, enhancing their authority, and tracking their results. The individual sections will have impact if adopted alone; taken together, however, they offer policy makers a powerful opportunity to help reduce victimization and control corrections spending.

Pew will be working with state policy makers to tailor these provisions to the individual circumstances in selected states. For more information about the framework or to discuss how it might be applied in your state, please contact Richard Jerome, Project Manager, at rjerome@pewtrusts.org.

Executive Summary

1. Evidence-Based Practices

2. Earned Compliance Credits

3. Administrative Sanctions

4. Performance Incentive Funding

5. Performance Measurement