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THE COMMUNITY PENALTIES ACT OF 1983: AN EVALUATION OF THE LAW, ITS IMPLEMENTATION, AND ITS IMPACT IN NORTH CAROLINA
Abstract
Although most of the research on alternatives to incarceration has been methodologically flawed, the aggregate conclusion is that the promise of alternatives has not been met. Most alternatives programs have not worked with truly prison-bound offenders, and as a result, have "increased the net of social control." North Carolina's Community Penalties Act of 1983 created alternative sentence planning programs for certain nonviolent prison-bound offenders. The purposes of this study were to examine this legislation and its assumptions, to study its implementation by one of five authorized programs, and, by evaluating (with a randomized experimental design) the program's impact on sentencing decisions, to test the law's assumption that such programs can affect prison commitments. The study found that a majority of the defendants eligible for service were prison-bound. When the experimentals' and controls' prison sentences were compared as a whole, significantly fewer experimentals received active prison sentences of 12, 24, and 36 months or more. Overall mean sentence lengths did not differ; however, with outliers excluded, experimentals received significantly less active time. The two groups were subdivided as high-risk (statistically predicted to receive an active sentence of 12 months or more) and low-risk (statistically predicted to receive a sentence of less than 12 months). The low-risk defendants in the experimental and control groups did not differ significantly on any measure of sentence outcome. However, the high-risk experimentals, when compared with high-risk controls, received significantly fewer active sentences and more sentences of probation, as well as fewer sentences of 6, 12, 24, and 36 months or more. The results above illustrate the study's most salient implication. That is, the program apparently had much more effect on sentences of high-risk defendants--defendants that the program was designed to serve--than it had on the sentences of low-risk defendants. Prison commitments were significantly reduced for this group. These results support the contention that alternative sentence planning programs should concentrate on higher risk defendants and rely on their own selection of clients based on objective criteria, rather than attorney referrals that tend to widen the net of social control.
Subject Area
Social psychology
Recommended Citation
WALLACE, W. LEANN, "THE COMMUNITY PENALTIES ACT OF 1983: AN EVALUATION OF THE LAW, ITS IMPLEMENTATION, AND ITS IMPACT IN NORTH CAROLINA" (1987). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8717267.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8717267