Review some of the recent effects of the nation's fiscal crisis on police, courts, and corrections organizations

Question

What will be an ideal response

Answer 1

• Police:
• Layoffs of sworn officers are rampant.
• Seventy percent of agencies cut back or eliminated training programs, while police around the nation were telling their citizens to file their own reports for home burglaries and other lesser crimes.
• Many officers lost the right to take their patrol cars home, or were forced to pay for the privilege.
• Officers in some communities were told to turn off their ignition whenever they were stopped and idling for more than a minute.
• Some departments switched to lower octane gasoline and installed GPS receivers in patrol cars to make dispatching more efficient.
• Some state troopers began sitting and monitoring traffic rather than cruising the highways, and increased their use of single-engine airplanes to look for speeders.
• Courts: hiring and salary freezes, cutting salaries, furloughing and laying off staff members, closing courts completely, raising filing fees, and doing away with metal detectors because they can no longer pay for personnel to operate them
• Corrections: at least 26 states had slashed prison funding (seven by more than 10 percent), causing widespread job losses, wage freezes, changes in food offerings for inmates, and cutbacks in community-based reentry programs