Community Corrections in Kansas: Extending Community-Based Corrections or Widening the Net?

Abstract

Community corrections acts (CCAs) have been established in several states and have become increasingly popular at a time of widespread prison overcrowding. While community corrections needs to be perceived in wider terms than simply as an alternative to incarceration, it is the case that an important feature of all such programs is the diversion of prison-bound offenders into the community. Emerging from recent correctional evaluation literature has been a recurrent and disconcerting trend—the failure of many “diversionary” programs to target the appropriate clients. In many cases community-based programs become adjuncts to probation rather than alternatives to incarceration, thereby widening the net of social control. This article presents findings from a recent evaluation of the 1978 Kansas CCA. It suggests that such “net-widening” is not an inevitable by-product of community-based alternative programs and that present crowding problems faced by Kansas would have been far worse without the CCA.

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