What are the rates of recidivism in community-based programs?
In Illinois, they’ve opened the nation’s first fully-dedicated drug treatment prison, and the initial data there indicate less recidivism and greater [post-release] employment compared to folks in traditional prisons. North Carolina is a good example of a state that looked very carefully at who they wanted in prison. In the mid-1980s, they were under threat of a federal takeover, and they adopted an entirely new sentencing structure that puts violent offenders in prison for longer terms, and steers lower-risk offenders toward community-based punishment. The percentage of felons sentenced to prison terms fell 47 per cent to 37 per cent, and that allowed them to make sure their prison space was available for the most serious offenders, and that the prison terms served by felony offenders more than doubled, from 16 months in 1993 to 39 months in 2005. In the 10 years since those sentencing reforms began, both the violent crime rate and the total crime rate in North Carolina have dropped.
