Community correction is commonly understood as the supervision of criminal offenders in the residential areas as opposed to correctional facilities confinement. Another word for community correction is community supervision. The two community corrections include parole and probation. The society is affected in a number of ways by community correction. A law was enacted to provide a justice system that was different from the traditional system of locking up offenders. This system is less costly and requires lees control. The prison population is controlled by keeping offenders out of prison and letting them serve in the community where they work, pay restitution child support, participate in treatment and comply with other terms of their service. Part of the cost of supervision is incurred by the offenders.
Community correction is extremely a crucial part of the bureaus correctional programs. Staff in the community correction program administer and develops the contracts for community based programs. The residential reentry centers are contracted to assist inmates that are near release. These houses provide a structured, safe, supervised environment, financial management, job placement and other programs from parole and probation, to intermediate sanctions such as community residential centers, work release, prerelease guidance centers, partial incarceration, and nonprofit organization. A crucial role is played by the community corrections in maintaining a balance of the criminal justice system in the United States. In many foreign countries, there is no guarantee for offenders to have their constitutional right unlike in the United States. If a different prison system is adopted in the United States, both positive and negative effects would be observed and felt. All these result will have its effect on the war on crime. Prison system varies enormously from different countries as the designed differently and the people implementing the system have different ideologies.
Many hypotheses can be made concerning community corrections and their effectiveness. My hypothesis would be on the preference of the community correction be used on youth offenders but not adults offenders. The main aim of any correction facility is to deter the offender from going back to crime, a thing that might not work well when adult offenders are placed in community corrections. The projects used in the community supervision are like washing squad cars and litter patrol. For student offenders, most of their projects involve cleaning of school area where their peer friends are observing them and hence they are discouraged from crime. Community supervision will only accommodate petty crime offenders but not violent crime offenders. The degree and intensity of crime committed is extremely crucial when choice of correction facilities is concerned.
Prison system outside the United States is hugely different from the United States system. Poor prison condition and environment results in human rights violations, sickness, and deaths. These are the key characteristics of many prisons in foreign countries. In many nations, prisoners have no right to legal counsel, subjected to torture, unjustly imprisoned, mistreatment as a part of interrogation, cannot contact family members, lack of enough water and food, spread of diseases and lack medical care and sanitary living conditions. In some cases, these prisons are overcrowded with children, women while some remand prisoners are accommodated along with convicts, adult, and men. A lot of public outcries and foreign pressure have been directed to prison reform, but little is done until this far.
Other nations view imprisonment as a way to cast offenders out of the society. Prisons are perceived as extremely poor place, which are meant for unscrupulous people who should not be in the society. Everything evil is attributed with prison and hence prisoners are deemed to be mistreated and treated in an inhumane manner. People do not like getting involved with prisoners or the prison community and hence no audience for the outcry of suffering prisoners. By an offender being sent to prison, the public is mostly against the idea of reincorporating the offenders back to the community, as they are feared to repeat the same crimes.
The United States prison systems can be termed efficient as compared to other system of foreign countries. Many changes would be impacted by adoption of other countries prison system to the United States system. A positive effect might be the reduction of prisoners’ numbers in the United States prisons. This is because of the vast numbers of petty crime offenders in the United States prison. The numbers are estimated to vary around 500000 offenders who would have been released by bond or be sent to community corrections. On the other hand, the prison standards in the United States would drastically fall, as extremely little interest would be directed on the offender’s sides. With the vast number of prisoners in the United States prisons, the healthy conditions would soon be unbearable, and this would cause loss lives.
The community correction idea to implement in my community would be to use community supervision for youths and a stiffer correction for the adults. Major analysis should be conducted before releasing any prisoner back to the community to ensure that the crime mentality is always discouraged. Every member of the community should take part in integrating back released prisoner into the community and treat them warmly. When a prisoner is released and faces rejection from the community, he, or she is always attracted back to crime and will try to revenge it out on the community. Community policing will steer the security of the society higher by everyone’s participation.