What are graduated sanctions and why were they developed.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

In these days of severe budget cuts and the concerns of cost-conscious politicians, there has been a tendency to turn to evidence-based research to see what can be done to reduce probation revocations. After all, one of the advantages of probation is supposed to be saving the taxpayer money, and probation is hardly a cost cutter if it is simply a deferred incarceration. Probation officers enjoy a certain amount of discretion as whether or not to formally violate someone’s probation and the reasons why he or she will do so. A formal probation violation goes before the sentencing judge with a recommendation from the officer regarding whether or not the suspended prison sentence should be imposed. One of the ways state legislatures and correctional departments have addressed the issue is by turning to actuarial assessment tools devised by criminal justice researchers to determine the circumstances of for technical and in some cases, minor criminal violations of probation. They are designed to eliminate costly court appearances and incarcerations for offenders whose violations do not bear directly on their threat to the community or their rehabilitation. In the graduated sanction highlighted in the text, both the violations and the sanctions attached to them have a three-level hierarchy of increasing seriousness of violation and increasing severity of punishment. Under this scheme, offenders are only brought before a judge for technical violations after a probationer reaches Level 3 violations and after all appropriate casework interventions have been exhausted. While state legislatures have designed these assessment tools primarily as cost-cutting devices, they also appear to be useful correctional tools by providing officers with a uniform way of responding to violations, thus making authoritarian law enforcement–oriented officers less punitive and permissive social work–oriented officers less indulgent with their offenders’ transgressions.