A Presidential Roadmap to Ending Mass Incarceration: Invest in People, not Prisons

The next President can use federal dollars to incentivize or encourage reform to state and local probation and parole supervision practices that would:
• Ensure probation is being used as an alternative to prison, rather than applied to people who should not remain in the criminal legal system
• Reduce initial probation lengths at sentencing, with three-year caps and opportunities for early discharge
• Ban incarceration as a response to technical violations
• Eliminate the use of probation and parole revocations and short-term incarceration for violations that do not involve a new offense, establishing a system of graduated sanctions with incentives for compliance and swift, certain and proportional responses to violations
• Provide oversight over decisions to revoke supervision, tracking racial and geographic disparities
• Remove blanket probation and parole conditions and require any condition imposed by a judge have an articulable nexus to a risk or need of that particular individual
• End wealth-based probation and parole practices, such as allowing probation terms to be extended as a result of nonpayment of fines, fees, restitution or other court costs
• Support earned compliance credit programs that shorten probation terms by granting 30 days credit for each month of compliance
• Discharge people early when they are successful in probation and no longer pose a risk
• Institute early presumptive termination opportunities for parolees, lowering parole rolls and rewarding compliance
• Eliminate private probation