NCJ Number
190122
Journal
Journal of Criminal Justice Volume: 29 Issue: 4 Dated: July/August 2001 Pages: 307-318
Editor(s)
Kent B. Joscelyn
Date Published
August 2001
Length
12 pages
Annotation
This article explored the extent to which intermediate sanctions facilitate the exercise of proportionality and accountability in punishment decision-making through a review of intermediate sanctions literature, describing data, analytic strategy, and findings of a study of the extent to which offense seriousness and offender risk help to predict the imposition of intermediate sanctions as a responses to violations among probation violators, and recommendations for probation policy and practice and future intermediate sanctions research.
Abstract
There was a growing recognition that intermediate sanctions were essential to the establishment of accountability and proportionality in punishment decision-making. The purpose of this study was to explore the extent to which proportionality and accountability influenced the use of intermediate sanctions in response to probation violators in a large urban county. It explored the extent to which one jurisdiction’s use of intermediate penalties was consistent with the concept of a continuum of sanctions. Using indiscriminant analyses, the study found that indicators of proportionality and accountability helped to predict which violators remained under traditional supervision, graduated to intermediate sanctions, or were revoked. The results were more intense in the analyses that took both technical violations and new arrests into account than in analyses involving new arrests only. Also, it was important to emphasize a previous observation that even in a jurisdiction that aggressively promoted the use of intermediate sanctions, revocation was the preferred response to probation violations. Tables and references