Title: What Future for "Public Safety" and "Restorative Justice" in Community
Corrections?
Series: Research in Brief
Author: Michael E. Smith
Published: National Institute of Justice, June 2001
Subject: Community-based corrections, victim-offender mediation, restorative
justice
19 pages
39,000 bytes

---------------------------

Figures, charts, forms, and tables are not included in this ASCII plain-text file.
To view this document in its entirety, download the Adobe Acrobat graphic file
available from this Web site or order a print copy from NCJRS at 800-851-
3420 (877-712-9279 For TTY users).

---------------------------

U.S. Department of Justice 
Office of Justice Programs
National Institute of Justice

National Institute of Justice

Sentencing & Corrections 
Issues For The 21st Century

June 2001
No. 11

What Future for "Public Safety" and "Restorative Justice" in Community
Corrections?

by Michael E. Smith

"Public safety" and "restorative justice" are big ideas now making claims on the
future of community corrections. They are appealing as strategic objectives for
probation and parole agencies that are unable to generate fiscal and political
support for the modest objectives of "enforcing court orders," "meeting client
needs," and "reducing recidivism." When the two ideas are examined more
closely, however, their futures seem uncertain. They have important features in
common, but they conflict in ways which, left unresolved, could sap their
strategic value; they face challenges to which they are unevenly suited; and each
requires daunting transformations of the criminal justice system. 

Despite their uncertain futures, restorative justice and public safety are already
reshaping community corrections around the country. Minnesota's Department
of Corrections, for example, has had a full-time Restorative Justice Planner on
staff for 7 years. Vermont's Corrections Commissioner is methodically trying to
turn his agency from what he characterizes as the empty execution of
retributive, court-imposed sanctions, toward partnership with informal
community boards ("reparative boards") to restore victims, offenders, and
communities.[1] Meanwhile, embracing public safety as the strategic 
objective for corrections, Washington State amended its "just deserts"-based
corrections law in 1999, effecting a strategic redeployment of probation and
parole agents. They are now responsible for enhancing and preserving public
safety generally, in the places where individual offenders under supervision are
found. Wisconsin has similarly redeployed its community corrections staff, in
two counties, to explore the capacity of community corrections to pursue a
public safety strategy effectively.

If public safety and restorative justice are to have a future in community
corrections as strategic objectives for probation and parole, an assessment of
their relative merits is in order.

Public safety as strategic objective 

In order for public safety to serve as a strategic objective for community
corrections, answers are needed to some basic questions: What is public
safety? Where is it found? What would probation and parole agencies have to
do for there to be more of it? In popular discourse, public safety is equated
with more arrests, more prisoners, longer sentences, and lower rates of
recidivism. These are conventional output measures of the criminal justice
system, but they are poor proxies for public safety. 

Public safety defined

As an objective for community corrections, public safety is best conceived as
the condition of a place, at times when people in that place are justified in
feeling free of threat to their persons and property.[2] As a condition of place
and time, public safety is threatened whenever a vulnerable person or
unguarded property is in the same place as a potential offender at a time when
the place, the potential victim or property, and the potential offender are all
without guardians--people who have a protective relationship to them.

The role of guardians

This view of public safety directly challenges offender-focused probation and
parole case management. It emphasizes instead the need for unofficial, naturally
occurring guardians of people and places. Guardians are people who have a
protective relationship to vulnerable targets, people who have an intimate or
supervisory relationship to potential offenders (whether the offenders are under
correctional supervision or not), and people who are responsible for places
where the two may come together. Guardians--who may be parents, wives,
children, friends, neighbors, employers, local shopkeepers, and security guards,
for example--are abundant in safe places. Where they are absent, there is no
public safety. But they can be and are found in dangerous places too, and it is
by mobilizing them that probation and parole agents most effectively increase
and preserve public safety.[3]

By and large, conventional community corrections has not operated this way. It
has offered a modicum of incapacitation of known offenders, for set periods of
time, and it has aimed to improve their character and circumstances so that they
do not offend again. For probation and parole agents to contribute to public
safety in the places where potential offenders may come together with potential
victims, they need to look beyond conventional caseload management
techniques. They need to find and invoke the authority of the naturally occurring
guardians on whom any community depends for its safety. This means broad
engagement of probation and parole agents with offenders in the places where
they pose risks; with police officers in those places; with other members of the
offenders' communities; and with their families, neighbors, employers, friends,
and (even) enemies.

Restorative justice in community corrections

Some probation and parole practitioners who are enthusiastic about restorative
justice embrace the idea because they see in it a better way to deliver what has
been required of them all along; others embrace it as a new justice paradigm,
capable of displacing the retributive justice paradigm for which they doubt
community corrections is well suited.

In practice, the idea takes many forms: from family group conferencing to
Native American sentencing circles, from victim-offender mediation to
"reintegrative shaming," from monetary restitution and community service orders
to the various victims' rights now woven into conventional criminal justice
processes. At its core restorative justice rejects the criminal law's focus on
culpability and retribution and casts punitive responses to criminal conduct as
aggravators of the harm already done. In this new paradigm the purpose of
justice is to restore the victim and the victim's intimates (who suffer the harm),
the community (whose fabric is torn by the crime), and the offender (who will
remain part of that community, or will reenter it before long, and who, if
unrestored, represents a continuing threat to it). 

The key restorative practices are respectful listening to the victim's story of the
harm done, voluntary acceptance of responsibility by the offender (also heard
respectfully, lest stigmatization and self-loathing block the offender's return to
full membership in the community); and voluntary undertaking by the offender to
make amends for the harms resulting from his crime. For the most part,
restorative justice is understood by community corrections practitioners not as
an outcome, but as a process. As such, its features are thought to be
instrumentally important but its outcome is necessarily indeterminate until the
process has run its course.[4]

Complementary ideas

The purchase of these two ideas on the future of community corrections is likely
to be stronger to the extent they (and the energy of their proponents) can
somehow be merged. They have enough in common to make this more
plausible than might at first appear.

Political interdependence

To be effective in pursuing either the restorative justice idea or the public safety
idea, community corrections agencies will have to enlarge their operational
capacity. That requires not just redeploying personnel and resources, but also
establishing collaborative relationships with the many others whose participation
is required for either idea to be realized. In addition, neither idea can be fully
realized without a substantial overhaul of sentencing and corrections law. None
of these transformations is imminent. If the demands for collaboration and for
wrenching transformations are made in competition with each other, the
prospects for success are dim. Success would be more likely if both ideas
attract broad, overlapping constituencies and if, in combination, they stimulate
greater demand for the required transformations than either stimulates by itself. 

In his recent, exhaustive review of programs incorporating restorative justice
processes, John Braithwaite projects no easy victory for this new model over
the retributive and rehabilitative justice models that give shape and substance to
sentencing and corrections today. His caution arises in part from recognition
that "[i]f we take restorative justice seriously, it ... means transformed
foundations of criminal jurisprudence and of our notions of freedom,
democracy, and community."[5] Similarly, for a community corrections agency
to take public safety seriously, for it to redeploy personnel and resources
accordingly, and for it to be accountable for public safety in the places where
offenders are found-- 

[the agency] would have to develop capacities to do more than warehouse and
case-work known offenders. It would have to develop knowledge about the
great variety of public safety problems, in hundreds of neighborhoods, and ...
deploy its resources to counter them.... [I]ncremental investments in existing
strategies and tinkering with current arrangement of institutional responsibility
will not suffice. Radical restructuring is required--restructuring of our
conception of the public safety problem, of the legal instruments aimed at it,
[and] of the strategies and penal measures employed against it.[6]

Combination rather than competition is prudent for the proponents of both
restorative justice and public safety, and combination is possible. The
collaborations and transformations separately required by these reform agendas
have more in common than most of their proponents assume.

Conceptual overlap

Both public safety and restorative justice incorporate each other's essential
features. The triangular "web of interdependency" (victims, offender,
community) on which restorative processes rely has much in common with the
networks of naturally occurring guardians on which public safety depends.

Kay Pranis, since 1994 the full-time Restorative Justice Planner of the
Minnesota Department of Corrections, has guided the adoption of restorative
justice processes in diverse neighborhoods around her State. She has arrived at
the view, shared by many others working inside correctional agencies, that
creating safe communities requires active citizen involvement:

It calls for a reengagement of all citizens in the process of determining shared
norms, holding one another accountable to those norms and determining how
best to resolve breaches of the norms in a way which does not increase risk in
the community.[7]

The conditions necessary for public safety can be similarly described: a set of
generally agreed-upon rules of behavior, a shared appreciation that
rule-breaking will be punished, and a further appreciation that playing by the
rules will be rewarded. Viewed this way, creating and maintaining public safety
requires teaching the lessons of responsibility and accountability and reinforcing
them in raising children, supervising adolescents, and producing law-abiding
young adults. These are tasks for parents, neighbors, schools, churches, athletic 
teams, community service groups, the local labor market, and--on what needs
to be relatively rare occasions--a local police, probation, or parole officer.

It is John Braithwaite who has most clearly identified the conceptual overlap of
restorative justice processes and the protection of public safety. "[R]estorative
justice," he writes, "can remove crime prevention from its marginal status in the
criminal justice system [and] can deliver the motivation and widespread
community participation crime prevention needs to work."[8] Taking the point a
step further, he argues that deterrence and incapacitation are more likely to be
effective strategies for reducing crime if they are grounded in restorative justice
principles:

[P]unishing crooks is a less efficient deterrence strategy than opening up
discussion with a wide range of actors with preventive capabilities, some of
whom might be motivated by a raised eyebrow to change their behavior in
ways that prevent reoffending. [The strategy] is to keep expanding the number
of players involved in a restorative justice process until we find someone who
surprises us by being influenced through the dialogue to mobilize some
unforeseen preventive capability.[9]

This closely resembles the public safety argument for redeploying community
corrections agents to the places where public safety is most in disrepair. There,
they can combine with naturally occurring guardians of the offenders under
supervision, of the people who are or might become vulnerable to them, and of
the locations where they might come together. Seen this way, both "restorative
justice" and "public safety" are ideas that seek out--and seek to create--
circumstances in which specific and general deterrent effects are realized
through the proper functioning of restored community. Notably, both ideas
deemphasize the role of the state in effecting deterrence. 

Conflicting ideas

If public safety and restorative justice are not wholly incompatible as strategic
ideas for community corrections, there remain distinctions between them that
could easily lead the pursuit of one to undermine the other.

Incompatible strategies

Community corrections has long been in the business of "normalizing"
offenders--trying to render them harmless by securing their adherence to
community norms. If public safety were seriously pursued as the strategic
objective, community corrections would also be trying to normalize the places
where known offenders are found in the midst of those who are vulnerable to
them. And if community corrections were fully to embrace restorative justice
principles, it would take upon itself the much larger task of normalizing
("restoring") communities. It is difficult if not impossible for a single agency to be
effective in pursuing all three strategic ideas, any one of which would tend to
consume its entire operational capacity.

Incompatible purposes

Those eager to incorporate restorative justice principles into community
corrections are not inclined to view public safety as a worthy purpose. Some
are reluctant to accept it as a purpose because they do not believe its
achievement lies within the capacity of the agencies supervising offenders in
communities. Others are reluctant because they doubt that public safety will
ever be understood, by those who hold them to account, as something other
than more arrests, revocations, and prison terms.[10]

There is a perhaps more fundamental conflict between these two strategic
ideas, one that has the potential to sink any serious attempt to pursue both in
the same agency. To produce or preserve public safety, community corrections
would have to be proactive in its use of state authority and resources. Probation
and parole agents would have to be dispersed to the places where public safety
is in disrepair, where they can be active in supervising offenders and engaged
with naturally occurring guardians of those offenders and of the people and
places vulnerable to them. But by projecting the authority of the state into the
community this way, by collecting the information needed to understand local
public safety problems, and by making partners of the naturally occurring
guardians with whom it would need to combine to be effective, a corrections
agency is likely to be viewed--perhaps accurately--as distorting the "fabric of
community" on which restorative justice processes and outcomes depend. 

By contrast, restorative justice processes, like conventional justice processes,
are largely reactive. They are invoked after a crime occurs. To be sure, their
usefulness as problem-solving techniques orients them to the future more
robustly than the conventional justice processes of adjudication, sentencing, and
correction. Yet they are tied to particular conflicts and crimes, rather than to the 
patterns of conflict and crime that would draw on the problem-solving capacity
of a community corrections agency committed to public safety as its strategic
objective.

Further challenges

Resolving the conflicts between public safety and restorative justice is not the
sole challenge. Proponents of each of these strategic ideas might be asked how
a community corrections agency interested in incorporating either one could
meet a half-dozen other challenges. 

Victims

It cannot be assumed that crime victims in general want any particular thing, or
that any particular victim wants whatever it is that a system of justice has to
offer.[11] Nevertheless, for restorative justice to find victims a challenge is a bit
of an embarrassment. "Restoring the victim" is a central objective and method
of restorative justice, and proponents of the restorative justice idea in
community corrections often simply assume victims will support their adoption
of it. However, important segments of the U.S. victims' movement are opposed
to one, another, or all restorative justice initiatives. There are several reasons:

--In the hands of community corrections agencies whose habits are offender
focused, restorative justice processes can cast victims as little more than props
in a psychodrama focused on the offender, to restore him (and thereby render
him less likely to offend again).

--A victim, supported by family and intimates while engaged in restorative
conferencing, and feeling genuinely free to speak directly to the offender, may
press a blaming rather than restorative shaming agenda. Restorative justice
principles can be understood to constrain victims from doing so, because
stigmatization of this kind (what Braithwaite terms "disintegrative shaming")
leaves victims more vulnerable and offenders more motivated to offend. But
devices intended to script victims' participation are also destructive of
restorative processes and, of course, offensive to victims.

--The victims' movement has focused for years on a perceived imbalance of
"rights." Defendants were advantaged by the presumption of innocence, the
right to proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the right not to have to acknowledge
responsibility--or testify at all--and, when proof is legally insufficient, freedom
from punishments they deserve in fact. Victims, on the other hand were
extended no rights at all in the legal process. 

Over the past two decades, as the infrastructure of a victims' movement grew,
so did a new set of "victims' rights": right to allocution at sentencing, right to
notification of plea offers, right to be heard at parole release hearings and to be
notified of them, and (in some places) right to be present at executions. To
many in the movement, these are crucial gains that are threatened by some
features of the restorative justice process, such as respectful listening to the
offender's story and consensual dispositions. These features seem affronts to a
victim's claim of the right to be seen as a victim, to insist on the offender being
branded a criminal, to blame the offender, and not to be "victimized all over
again by the process."

--Many victims do want apology, if it is heartfelt and easy to get, but some
want, even more, to put the traumatic incident behind them; to retrieve stolen
property being held for use at trial; to be assured that the offender will receive
treatment he is thought to need if he is not to victimize someone else; or to
realize any other of the countless unpredictable, individualized objectives victims
reveal when they are asked. And while the deliberative, consensual processes
of restorative justice are well-suited to discovery of a victim's objectives,
victims are often confident they already know them. For victims such as these,
restorative justice processes can seem unnecessary at best.

Of course, many individual victims and leaders in the victims' movement do not
sense this challenge to restorative justice, or view the problems as minor ones in
light of the potential gains. As a result, restorative justice initiatives in community
corrections agencies can usually claim the endorsement and involvement of
some victims and victim advocates. 

But the greatest challenge victims pose to restorative justice is indifference.
Restorative processes depend, case by case, on victims' active participation, in
a role more emotionally demanding than that of complaining witness in a
conventional criminal prosecution--which is itself a role avoided by many,
perhaps most victims. Their reasons for avoiding the role of prosecution witness
are also many. Some of them ("It's just not worth it to me," or "I need to be at
my job," or "I have to take care of the kids," or "I'm going to the football
game") will render a victim equally unenthusiastic about being restored through
respectful dialogue with the offender and his circle of supporters. 

The idea that public safety should be the strategic objective of community
corrections agencies faces a slightly different challenge under this heading, but
one just as serious and complex. It is hard to engage naturally occurring
guardians for a victim who will not acknowledge the need for such
guardianship, or who insists that the sufficient response to the crime is a
substantial prison term for the offender.

Offenders

Similarly, offenders present challenges to both strategic ideas, but for
restorative justice, the difficulty is isolated within the offender, who may not
readily agree to participate in the process by acknowledging responsibility and
making amends. For public safety, the challenge is to overcome the
offender-centered habits of the criminal justice process and its correctional
apparatus. The focus of community corrections agents on the individual
offender, and on the penal measures applied to him, obscures their view of and
capacity for analyzing the continuing threats to public safety--problems of which
the offender under supervision may be but a part. 

"What works"

An idea that has captured the imagination and enthusiasm of community
corrections practitioners of all ranks in recent years is that their interventions in
the lives of offenders will yield powerful rehabilitative effects if they embody
"what works" principles. These are principles drawn from meta-analyses of
large numbers of program evaluations. Ironically, commitment to this new
recipe for efficacy limits the prospects for making either public safety or
restorative justice the central strategic idea for community corrections. The new
principles of effective intervention require that offenders be matched to services
on the basis of risk classification, criminogenic needs, and individual
characteristics found to be significant through the meta-analyses, and that the
intervention be grounded in cognitive-behavioral treatment.

Both restorative justice and public safety are likely to prove elusive strategic
objectives for a community corrections agency committed to "what works"
principles: "What works" focuses on the individual offender even more
intensively than do conventional probation and parole, while both public safety
and restorative justice are concerned with individual offenders only within the
webs of interdependency (or networks of naturally occurring guardians) that
ordinarily regulate individual behavior.[12]

Facts

Reliable factfinding is needed at every stage of criminal justice processing, if the
purpose for which the process is invoked is to be realized in the individual case.
But facts are difficult to agree upon, they change over time, and it is often
difficult to determine which facts are relevant to crucial decisions--decisions
about what correctional regimen to impose and decisions made in the course of
probation or parole supervision. Effective pursuit of public safety by a
community corrections agency requires reliable factfinding and reasoning from
those facts, on matters about which most jurisdictions are extraordinarily casual
in current law and practice. Sentencing courts do not often require empirical
support for a prosecution claim that public safety requires this offender to do 2
years, and that one 5. Nor is evidence often offered in support of defense
claims that a particular program will affect a particular offender in a way and to
an extent necessary for public safety to be preserved. Corrections agencies
themselves are, at best, uneven in their capacity for this sort of factfinding and
reasoning.

Overhauling factfinding procedures to the extent required is a major challenge
for a community corrections agency committed to pursuing a public safety
strategy. Failure to do so exposes the agency, and the rest of us, to the risks of
a public safety regime in which penal authority and resources are deployed as
they are now, but in greater measure and without reason and without a basis in
fact. The result could quickly become a harsh and wasteful regime in which
public safety is sought using all available penal measures in every case, without
regard to the plausibility of any.

The restorative justice process also requires factfinding--about what happened
and why, what harms resulted, and what paths there are to restoration for each
party having a stake in the crime. However, reliability of the facts used in the
process may be less important than their utility in bringing the various
stakeholders together. In restorative justice, the facts are relied on not so much
to support inferential reasoning about likely consequences of particular uses of
penal authority but to precipitate and test the strength of individuals' feelings and
to move the process toward consensus. Greater factfinding rigor, and a legal
style of inferential reasoning from facts found, may be necessary for effective
pursuit of public safety, but they do not suit the restorative justice idea very
well.

Operational capacity

Although many community corrections agencies are exploring one or both of
these strategic ideas in practice, none really has the operational capacity to
pursue the ideas effectively--yet. That is in part because their staffs lack many
of the necessary skills and have been deployed for years in ways incompatible
with public safety purposes or restorative justice practices. No community
corrections agency has sufficiently enlarged its operational capacity, by
collaboration and integration with the naturally occurring forces of social control
on which public safety and restorative process depend, in communities where
the work must be done. Many are trying, and some are making good
progress.[13]

Rhetoric or reality?

"Restorative justice" and "public safety" are valuable strategic ideas in a
community corrections field in search of new operational principles and
animating themes. But they can be and often are devalued by their use as
rhetorical cover for business as usual. Offender accountability and victim
restoration look like promising strategic ingredients to corrections managers
who think themselves without a market for offender rehabilitation. Similarly,
embracing "public safety" seems smart in these risk-averse times, when the
public's experience of less crime-in-fact seems to leave fear of crime
in place.

There is no doubt that powerful ideas get a bit tarnished by political
exploitation, but their substantive value is not affected. The malaise in probation
and parole agencies is real, and it is shared by the public. It will not be
dissipated by slapping feel-good labels on impoverished correctional practices,
but it will motivate a continuing search for something more plausible than
probation and parole as we know them.

The need will remain for strategic redirection of community corrections--for
redeploying its legal authority and resources and enlarging its operational
capacity through broader engagement with communities. My view is that both
"public safety" and "restorative justice" have merit as ideas around which the
future of community corrections might coalesce, and that competing ideas do
not. Experience suggests that, under these conditions, the operational capacity
of community corrections will continue for some time to fall short of what the
ambitious new ideas require, but that efforts to apply them in practice will move
the field to another, better, but still transitional performance level.

Notes

1. These and other applications of the restorative justice idea to community
corrections are described in Incorporating Restorative and Community Justice
into American Sentencing and Corrections, by Leena Kurki, Research in
Brief-Sentencing & Corrections: Issues for the 21st Century, Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice/Corrections
Program Office, September 1999, NCJ 175723.

2. This is the descriptive definition of public safety adopted by the Reinventing
Probation Council in Broken Windows Probation, American Probation and
Parole Association and the Manhattan Institute, New York, 2000, 12. For a
more detailed discussion, see Reforming Sentencing and Corrections for Just
Punishment and Public Safety, by Michael E. Smith and Walter J. Dickey,
Research in Brief--Sentencing & Corrections: Issues for the 21st Century,
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of
Justice/Corrections Program Office, September 1999, NCJ 175724.

3. See Smith, M. E. and Dickey, W.J., "What If Corrections Were Serious
About Public Safety?" Corrections Management Quarterly 2 (3) (Summer
1998): 12-30; and Eck, J.E. and Weisburd, D., "Crime Places In Crime
Theory," in Crime and Place, ed. Eck and. Weisburd, Monsey, NY: Criminal
Justice Press, 1995.

4. These concepts are elaborated in Kurki (note 1 above). Also instructive is
"Restorative Justice: Assessing Optimistic and Pessimistic Accounts," by John
Braithwaite, in Crime and Justice, A Review of Research vol. 25, ed. Michael
Tonry, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. On the difficulty of defining
restorative justice, Braithwaite observes, "[S]takeholder deliberation determines
what restoration means" (p. 6).

5. Braithwaite, "Restorative Justice": 2.

6. Smith and Dickey, "What If Corrections Were Serious About Public
Safety?": 2, 26.

7. "Restorative Justice, Social Justice, and the Empowerment of Marginalized
Populations," in Restorative Community Justice: Repairing Harm and
Transforming Communities, eds. G. Bazemore and M. Schiff, Cincinnati:
Anderson Publishing Co., 2001.

8 Braithwaite, "Restorative Justice": 55.

9. Ibid.: 59.

10. For a report and discussion of these tensions in the community corrections
field, see Dickey, W.J., and Smith, M.E., Dangerous Opportunity: Five Futures
for Community Corrections, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice,
Office of Justice Programs, 1999.

11. For the great variety in what victims want after a crime, see Davis, R.S., et
al., The Role of the Complaining Witness in an Urban Criminal Court, New
York: Vera Institute and Victim Services Agency, 1980.

12. "What works" principles and restorative justice principles are drawn from
competing justice paradigms. The resulting tensions between them are detailed
in Levrant, S. et al., "Reconsidering Restorative Justice: The Corruption of
Benevolence Revisited?" Crime and Delinquency 45 (1) (1999).

13. For illustrations, see Dickey and Smith, Dangerous Opportunity: Five
Futures for Community Corrections.

---------------------------

About This Series

It is by now a commonplace that the number of people under criminal 
justice supervision in this country has reached a record high. As a result, the
sentencing policies driving that number, and the field of corrections, where the
consequences are felt, have acquired an unprecedented salience. It is a salience
defined more by issues of magnitude, complexity, and expense than by any
consensus about future directions. 

Are sentencing policies, as implemented through correctional programs and
practices, achieving their intended purposes? As expressed in the movement to
eliminate indeterminate sentencing and limit judicial discretion, on the one hand,
and to radically restructure our retributive system of justice, on the other, the
purposes seem contradictory, rooted in conflicting values. The lack of
consensus on where sentencing and corrections should be headed is thus no
surprise. 

Because sentencing and corrections policies have such major consequences-
-for the allocation of government resources and, more fundamentally and
profoundly, for the quality of justice in this country and the safety of its
citizens--the National Institute of Justice and the Corrections Program Office
(CPO) of the Office of Justice Programs felt it opportune to explore them in
depth. Through a series of Executive Sessions on Sentencing and Corrections,
begun in 1998 and continuing through the year 2000, practitioners and scholars
foremost in their field, representing a broad cross-section of points of view,
were brought together to find out if there is a better way to think about the
purposes, functions, and interdependence of sentencing and corrections
policies. 

We are fortunate in having secured the assistance of Michael Tonry, Sonosky
Professor of Law and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota Law School,
and Director, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, as project
director. 

One product of the sessions is this series of papers, commissioned by NIJ and
the CPO as the basis for the discussions. Drawing on the research and
experience of the session participants, the papers are intended to distill their
judgments about the strengths and weaknesses of current practices and about
the most promising ideas for future developments. 

The sessions were modeled on the executive sessions on policing held in the
1980s and 1990s under the sponsorship of NIJ and Harvard's Kennedy
School of Government. Those sessions played a role in conceptualizing
community policing and spreading it. Whether the current sessions and the
papers based on them will be instrumental in developing a new paradigm for
sentencing and corrections, or even whether they will generate broad-based
support for a particular model or strategy for change, remains to be seen. It is
our hope that in the current environment of openness to new ideas, the session
papers will provoke comment, promote further discussion and, taken together,
will constitute a basic resource document on sentencing and corrections policy
issues that will prove useful to State and local policymakers.

National Institute of Justice
U.S. Department of Justice 

Corrections Program Office
U.S. Department of Justice

---------------------------

Michael E. Smith is a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School. 

This study was supported by cooperative agreement 97-MUMU-K006
between the National Institute of Justice and the University of Minnesota.

Findings and conclusions of the research reported here are those of the author
and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S.
Department of Justice. 

The National Institute of Justice is a component of the Office of Justice
Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the Bureau of
Justice Statistics, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and
the Office for Victims of Crime.

This and other NIJ publications can be found at and downloaded from the NIJ
Web site (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij).

NCJ 187773

The Executive Sessions on Sentencing and Corrections 
Convened the following distinguished panel of leaders in the fields:

Neal Bryant
Senator
Oregon State Senate

Harold Clarke
Director
Department of Correctional Services
State of Nevada

Cheryl Crawford
Acting Director, Office of Development and Communications
National Institute of Justice
U.S. Department of Justice

Walter Dickey
Evjue-Bascom Professor of Law
University of Wisconsin 

Ronald Earle
District Attorney
Austin, Texas

Tony Fabelo
Director
Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council

Richard S. Gebelein
Superior Court Judge
Wilmington, Delaware

John Gorczyk
Commissioner
Department of Corrections
State of Vermont

Kathleen Hawk Sawyer
Director
Federal Bureau of Prisons
U.S. Department of Justice

Sally T. Hillsman
Deputy Director
National Institute of Justice
U.S. Department of Justice

Martin Horn
Secretary
Office of Administration
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

Susan M. Hunter
Chief, Prisons Division
National Institute of Corrections
U.S. Department of Justice 

Leena Kurki
Senior Research Associate
Council on Crime and Justice
Minneapolis

John J. Larivee
Chief Executive Officer
Community Resources for Justice

Joe Lehman
Secretary
Department of Corrections
State of Washington

Dennis Maloney
Director
Deschutes County (Oregon) 
Department of Community Justice

Larry Meachum
Director
Corrections Program Office
Office of Justice Programs
U.S. Department of Justice

Mark H. Moore
Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy and Management
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University

Norval Morris
Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Criminology, Emeritus
University of Chicago

Joan Petersilia
Professor of Criminology, Law and Society

School of Social Ecology
University of California, Irvine

Kay Pranis
Restorative Justice Planner
Department of Corrections
State of Minnesota

Michael Quinlan
Former Director
Federal Bureau of Prisons 
U.S. Department of Justice 

Chase Riveland
Principal
Riveland Associates

Thomas W. Ross
Director 
Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation
Former Chair
North Carolinian Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission

Dora B. Schriro
Director
Department of Corrections
State of Missouri

Michael Smith
Professor of Law
University of Wisconsin 

Morris Thigpen
Director
National Institute of Corrections
U.S. Department of Justice

Michael Tonry
Director
Institute of Criminology
University of Cambridge
Sonosky Professor of Law and Public Policy
University of Minnesota 
Project Director
Executive Sessions on Sentencing and Corrections

Jeremy Travis
Senior Fellow
The Urban Institute
Former Director
National Institute of Justice
U.S. Department of Justice

Reginald A. Wilkinson
Director
Department of Rehabilitation and Correction
State of Ohio