« Prison Policy Initiative provides "Mass Incarceration 101: Resources to help students and teachers understand the carceral system" | Main | On morning of scheduled federal trial, Hunter Biden attempts to enter an Alford plea »
September 5, 2024
"Terminating Supervision Early"
The title of this post is the title of this new article now available via SSRN and authored by Jacob Schuman. Here is its abstract:
Community supervision is a major form of criminal punishment and a major driver of mass incarceration. Over 3.5 million people in the United States are serving terms of probation, parole, or supervised release, and revocations account for nearly half of all prison admissions. Although supervision is intended to prevent crime and promote reentry, it can also interfere with the defendant’s reintegration by imposing onerous restrictions as well as punishment for non-criminal technical violations. Probation officers also carry heavy caseloads, which forces them to spend more time on enforcing conditions and less on providing support.
Fortunately, the criminal justice system also includes a mechanism to solve these problems: early termination of community supervision. From the beginning, the law has always provided a way for the government to cut short a defendant’s term of supervision if they could demonstrate that they had reformed themselves. Recently, judges, correctional officials, and activists have called to increase rates of early termination in order to save resources, ease the reentry process, and encourage rehabilitation. Yet despite all this attention from the field, there are no law-review articles on terminating supervision early.
In this Article, I provide the first comprehensive analysis of early termination of community supervision. First, I recount the long history of early termination, from the invention of probation and parole in the 1800s to the Safer Supervision Act of 2023. Next, I identify and critique recent legal changes that have made it harder for federal criminal defendants to win early termination of supervised release. Finally, I propose the first empirically based sentencing guideline on terminating supervision early, which I recommend in most cases after 18 to 36 months. If community supervision drives mass incarceration, then early termination offers a potential tool for criminal justice reform.
September 5, 2024 at 01:31 PM | Permalink
Comments
I have been astonished at how readily some Judges terminate supervised release early. Here in the Eastern District of Kentucky, we had a former Lexington police Lieutenant who had been a major player in the so-called "Bluegrass Conspiracy" [title of the book and the movie], where the biggest cocaine suppliers in town were police officers. This scheme came to light when the DEA chased a plane full of drugs over east Tennessee. Eventually, the pilot parachuted out of the plane, with a duffle bag full of cocaine tied by a long rope to his leg. His parachute failed to open and he died in a residential driveway. Investigators were surprised to find that the dead man was a Lexington police officer. A socially well-known young woman who hung out with the involved officers disappeared and he body has never been found. Many believe that the police Lieutenant (now deceased) killed her and secreted her body. He served 15 years in Federal prison and had 3 years of Supervised Release, but a Federal Judge here terminated it after only 1 year. I have also met a man foolish enough to violate his Supervised Release 3 times and be returned to prison 3 times, before the Judge terminated his Supervised Release.
Posted by: Jim Gormley | Sep 5, 2024 6:12:18 PM
