Chapter Resources
Chapter 1: Introduction to the Book: The Philosophical and Ideological Underpinnings of Corrections
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- Corrections is a social function designed to hold, punish, supervise, deter, and possibly rehabilitate the accused or convicted. It is also the study of these functions.
- Although it is natural to want to exact revenge ourselves when people do us wrong, the state has taken over this responsibility for punishment to prevent endless tit-for-tat feuds. Over social evolution, the state has moved to more restitutive forms of punishment that, while serving to tone down the community’s moral outrage, tempers it with sympathy.
- Much of the credit for the shift away from retributive punishment must go to the great Classical School of criminology, which was imbued with the humanistic spirit of the Enlightenment. The view of human nature (hedonistic, rational, and possessing free will) held by thinkers of the time was that punishment should primarily be used for deterrent purposes, that it should only just exceed the gains of crime, and that it should apply equally to all who have committed the same crime regardless of any individual differences. Opposing classical notions of punishment are those of the positivists who rose to prominence during the 19th century and who were influenced by the spirit of science. Positivists rejected the philosophical underpinnings regarding human nature of the classicists and declared that punishment should fit the offender rather than the crime.
- The objectives of punishment are retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and reintegration, all of which have come into favor, gone out, and come back again over the years.
- Retribution is simply just deserts—getting the punishment one deserves, with no other justification needed.
- Deterrence is the assumption that people are prevented from committing crime by the threat of punishment.
- Incapacitation means that the accused and convicted cannot commit further crimes (if they did so in the first place) against the innocent while incarcerated.
- Rehabilitation centers around efforts to socialize offenders in prosocial directions while they are under correctional supervision so that they will not commit further crimes.
- Reintegration refers to efforts to provide offenders with concrete skills they can use that will give them a stake in conformity.
- The United States leads the world in the proportion of its citizens that it has in prison. Whether this is indicative of hardness (more prison time for more people) or softness (imprisonment as an alternative to execution or mutilation) depends on how we view hardness versus softness and with which countries we compare the United States.
Chapter 2: The History of Corrections: Early Practices and Prisons
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- Human beings have been inventive in their development of punishments and ways in which to hold and keep people.
- Correctional history is riddled with efforts to improve means of coercion and reform.
- Those accused or convicted of crimes who had more means were less likely to be treated or punished severely.
- Sometimes the old worldviews (paradigms) are challenged by new evidence and ideas, and they are then discarded for new paradigms. The Enlightenment period in Europe was a time for rethinking old ideas and beliefs.
- Bentham, Beccaria, John Howard, and William Penn were all especially influential in changing our ideas about crime, punishment, and corrections.
- Correctional reforms, whether meant to increase the use of humane treatment of inmates or to increase their secure control, often lead to unintended consequences.
- Some early European and English versions of prisons and juvenile facilities were very close in mission and operation to America’s earliest prisons.
Chapter 3: Correctional History: Reforms and Themes
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- Howard, Beaumont and Tocqueville, and Dix all conducted studies of corrections in their day and judged the relative benefits of some practices and institutions over others, based on their data.
- The Pennsylvania and the New York early prisons were the models for most American prisons of the 19th century.
- The ideal conception of prisons was rarely achieved in reality.
- The Elmira Prison arose out of a prison reform movement that occurred roughly 50 years after the Auburn Prison was built.
- The Southern and Northern versions of prisons that followed the Civil War were not like Elmira and were instead focused on utilizing inmate labor for the production of goods for private contractors.
- The Stateville Prison, though conceived as a correctional institution and all that that implies, for the most part became a Big House prison.
- Correctional institutions, as a type of prison, do exist in a less-than-perfect form in the United States.
- Correctional institutions, as that term has been expanded to apply generically to jails, prisons, and some forms of community corrections, have been shaped by several themes throughout their history. These themes, though apparently constant, are a product of the times. For instance, the Eastern Penitentiary would not be built today as a general use prison because it would be considered cruel to isolate inmates from other human contact. Yet this kind of isolation, sometimes even with the tiny cells, is seen as beneficial by those who today build and operate super-max prisons for “special uses” to control incorrigible inmates (Kluger, 2007).
- In the following chapters, we will see such themes and the history of corrections as detailed here, dealt with again and again. However, although we continue to repeat both the mistakes and successes of the past, that does not mean we cannot, and have not, made any progress in corrections. There is no question that on the whole the vast majority of jails and prisons in this country are much better than were those for much of the last 200 years, though the unprecedented use of correctional sanctions in the United States would be regarded by some as overly harsh and thus a regressive trend. These themes presented here merely represent conundrums (e.g., how much money or compassion or religious influence, is the “right” amount), and as such we are constantly called upon to address them.
Chapter 4: Sentencing: The Application of Punishment
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- Sentencing is a post-conviction process in which the courts implement one or more of the punitive philosophies: retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, or rehabilitation. Sentencing decisions should be in accordance with justice.
- There are three major sentencing models: indeterminate (a range of possible years), determinate (a specific number of years), and mandatory (can exist under either of the above models but means that the person must be sent to prison; probation is not an option). Sentencing to a drug court is becoming increasingly popular in the United States.
- Truth-in-sentencing laws have led to longer sentences, a stronger move to determinate and mandatory sentencing, and to statutes such as habitual offender statutes.
- Sentencing disparity—sentences not accounted for by legally relevant variables—is a major concern in the criminal justice system. A big concern is whether African Americans’ more severe sentences are accounted for by their greater involvement in crime or by racism. The sentences imposed for crack versus powder cocaine possession have been a contentious issue because of racial differentials.
- Efforts have been made to “individualize” justice by providing judges with presentence reports, written by probation officers, which contain many factors about the person the judge is to sentence. A major controversy involving these reports is whether the defense should be able to view them.
- Sentencing guidelines are designed to eliminate sentencing disparity by submitting a person’s crime seriousness and prior record (in some states, with additional information included) to a scoring system. The person is then supposed to be sentenced the same way as every other person who receives the same score.
- Certain legal problems with sentencing under guidelines moved the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that the federal guidelines, which were previously mandatory, are now merely advisory. This opens up the door once again for wide levels of judicial discretion, and thus for sentencing disparity.
Chapter 5: Jails
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- County Jail
When new inmates arrive at this Portland county jail, officers maintain a zero-resistance policy
- County Jail
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- Jails in the United States are faced with any number of seemingly intractable problems. They are often overcrowded, or close to it, and house some of the most debilitated and vulnerable persons in our communities. They house the accused, the guilty, and the sentenced, as well as low-level offenders and the serious and violent ones. As with prisons, their mission is to incapacitate (even the untried), to deter, to punish, and even to rehabilitate. The degree to which they accomplish any of these goals is in large part determined by the political and social climate that the jail is nested in. Since the 1980s, the political climate has favored “harsh justice” meted out by policy makers and the actors in the criminal justice system and has led to the unrelenting business of filling and building prisons and jails across the country (Cullen, 2006; Irwin, 1985, 2005; Whitman, 2003).
- Jails have also served as a dumping ground for those who are marginally criminal and are unable, or unwilling, to access social services. Too often, the needs of such persons go unaddressed in communities, and as a result these unresolved needs either contribute to their incarceration (in the case of substance abuse and mental illness) or make it likely (such as in the case of homelessness) that they will enter and reenter the revolving jailhouse door.
- Sexual violence in jails remains problematic. It is likely true that the rate of violence between inmates and inmates or between staff and inmates has gone down in recent years. However, increased monitoring of this phenomenon is certainly called for and may serve to further reduce violence through the implementation of violence reduction techniques and training for staff. To that end, the implementation of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, with its reporting requirement for correctional institutions, represents a positive move in that direction.
- Thankfully, there have been some other hopeful developments on the correctional horizon. Jails in a position to do so have expanded their medical and treatment options to address the needs of inmates. Architectural and managerial solutions have been applied to jails in the form of new generation jails and co-equal pay for staff in sheriff’s departments, and some few jails have even experimented with community engagement to ensure that the needs of people in communities are not neglected when such folks enter jails or reenter communities.
Chapter 6: Community Corrections & Probation
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- Community-based corrections are used to control the behavior of criminal offenders while keeping them in the community. Conditional release (judicial reprieve) was practiced in ancient times in common law, but probation was not really established until the 20th century. Although often considered too lenient, community corrections benefits the public in many ways. Probation helps offenders by giving them a second chance to demonstrate that they can be law abiding in the community, and what helps offenders automatically helps the communities they live in.
- Because of many “get tough” policies, and although there are more Americans than ever under community supervision, the use of community corrections is declining relative to the use of incarceration.
- The client management classification system (CMC) is a tool designed to guide supervision and treatment strategies for offenders placed on probation. As with any tool, however, the CMC is only as good as the skill and conscientiousness with which it is used. The level of stress of the probation officers’ job leads many of them to burn out and to put less than adequate care and effort into attending to the many and varied tasks they need to carry out.
- Intermediate sanctions are considered to be more punitive than regular probation but less punitive than prison, although experienced criminals do not necessarily share that view. Some of these programs, particularly work release, show positive results, although this may be more a function of the kinds of offenders placed in them rather than the programs themselves. Most participants in these programs, however, tend to recidivate at rates not significantly different from parolees.
- Victim–offender reconciliation programs (VORPs) are a fairly recent addition to community corrections. They consider the victim, the offender, and the community as equal partners in returning the situation to its pre-victimization status. This idea of restorative justice is mostly used with juvenile offenders and minor adult offenders.
Chapter 7: Prisons
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- Prison Economy
Out of prison, it’s candy. In prison, it’s a ticket to black market survival. - San Quentin
Inmates must use outdoor restrooms at the prison. - Gangs vs. Guards
Find out which groups make up gangs in jails. - Inside Alexander Correctional Facility
A look inside a North Carolina prison within a prison. - Inmate Strike
- The Ropes
- Prison Nation
- Maximum Security
- Predators Behind Bars
- Sex Offender
- Breaking Point
- Worst of the Worst
- Attica Prison Riot
- Hi-Tech Prison
The prison design is called the “inverted fortress”.
- Prison Economy
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- Prisons come in various shapes and security levels.
- To varying degrees, inmates experience mortification and pain related to their status, and as humans they will behave in either pro- or antisocial ways to ameliorate that pain.
- Inmates adopt certain roles and engage in certain behaviors because they are prisonized and adopt the subculture, or because they import aspects of the culture from the outside community into the prison.
- “Total institutions” exist to different degrees, depending on the security level and operation of prisons.
- Gangs and violence are one way that inmates “adjust” to their environment and have their needs met and their pain alleviated.
- Mature coping is one way that correctional clients can fruitfully “adjust” and perhaps reform in that environment.
- Special population inmates present unique challenges for administrators interested in meeting their needs and keeping them safe in the correctional environment.
Chapter 8: The Correctional Experience for Staff
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- The War on Gunning
Female officers get exposed to male inmates. - Prison Guards
Training newbie guards to handle prison conflicts. - Breaking In
Prison Protocol and Convict Code in Georgia
- The War on Gunning
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- Parole is the legal status of a person who has been released from prison prior to completing his or her full term. The concept can be traced in the 19th century to Maconochie’s “ticket of leave” system in Australia and Walter Crofton’s Irish system. Parts of these systems were brought to the United States in the 1870s by Zebulon Brockway, superintendent of the Elmira Reformatory in New York. Brockway’s system required indeterminate sentencing so that “good time” earned through good conduct and labor could be used to reduce inmates’ sentences.
- In the modern United States, we have two systems of parole—discretionary and mandatory. Discretionary parole is granted by a parole board based on its perceptions of the inmate’s readiness to be released; mandatory parole is based simply on a mathematical formula of time served. Discretionary parolees are significantly more likely to successfully complete parole than mandatory parolees.
- The reentry of prisoners into the community is a very difficult process. The ex-con stigma makes getting employment problematic, and the period of absence makes it tough to reestablish relationships. Successful reentry depends on several factors, not the least of which are the policies of the parole authorities, as the huge gap between the Massachusetts and Utah “success” rates indicates. Nevertheless, providing parolees with concrete help such as job skills and drug rehabilitation programs can go a long way in helping them to remain crime-free. This effort may be particularly fruitful if it is made in some form of community-based residential program.
- Electronic monitoring and global positioning systems technology is increasingly used in corrections. It helps by increasing the level of offender monitoring and apprehension, but it cannot altogether prevent additional crimes committed by offenders while on the program, which is why candidates for this type of supervision must be chosen carefully. In sum, few programs can be said to work for most offenders if we define “working” unrealistically. Human nature is complicated, often ornery, and resistant to change. Even “ideal” programs such as those defined by Petersilia could only be expected (according to her) to reduce recidivism by about 30%.
Chapter 9: Community Corrections: Parole and Prisoner Reentry
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- Repeat Offenders Able to Walk
James Austen on how two career criminals out on parole got back on the street. - The High Price of Prison Time
After 14 years in the penitentiary, Donovan Green is ready to turn over a new leaf – but finding an opportunity to prove himself is proving harder than he anticipated.
- Repeat Offenders Able to Walk
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- The correctional experience for staff is fraught with challenges and much promise. It involves a diverse role that encompasses work with juvenile and adult inmates in institutions as well as with offenders in the community. It is not as narrow a role as is commonly perceived by the public, and it includes many opportunities to effectuate a just incarceration or community supervision experience for inmates and clients.
- Though many have worked long and hard to “professionalize” correctional work, there is every indication that most jobs in this area do not meet standard professional criteria.
- When correctional workers do not receive the requisite professional training and education they need to do their job in an appropriate manner, both clients and the community are likely to suffer.
- Many who labor in corrections undertake the “human service” role as it is presented by provision of goods and services, advocating for inmates/ offenders/clients, and assisting in their adjustment (Johnson, 2002).
- The research presented here would indicate that there are organizational factors that can be manipulated to improve this experience for staff so that they, and their organization, can realize their promise. Namely, better pay and benefits and training can be used to foster the greater development of professional attributes such as education and the consequent reduction in role ambiguity, turnover, and stress, and increase in job satisfaction. This research also indicates that the organization can do much to reduce the problems associated with the greater diversification of its staff. It can be open in its promotion practices so that false impressions regarding unfair advantage are not perpetuated and have a demoralizing effect on the workforce. It is also within the correctional organization’s power to prevent most sexual harassment, whether practiced by staff or inmates. In short, the promise of a positive correctional experience for staff is achievable, and as that perception seeps into the public consciousness, a “correctional officer” is much more likely to be perceived as a professional.
Chapter 10: Women and Corrections
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- Lockdown Women
Drugs cause a lot of violence in women’s prisons - Kids In Prison
A growing number of states incorporate nurseries into the prisons. - Female Offenders
- Special Management Unit
- Lockdown Women
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- Part of this shift in focus has occurred as the result of feminist work to equalize the work for women and the living and supervision arrangements for women and girls under correctional supervision.
- Recent research on women and girls under correctional supervision has highlighted the outstanding needs they have for educational, substance abuse, work training, parenting, and surviving abuse programming; Unfortunately, it has also shown that little programming is provided in either jails or prisons, or in the communities, to meet these needs.
- Female correctional officers have also faced a number of legal and institutional barriers to their full and equal employment in corrections.
- For the most part, many of these formal barriers have been removed as female officers have demonstrated their competencies in handling correctional work.
- Some researchers have even found a feminine style to officer work that employs the successful use of interpersonal communication skills to address inmate needs.
- However, there is still evidence that sexual and gender harassment, and the sexual abuse of female inmates, continues in some correctional environments. Though organizational remedies exist to “deal” with such abuse, they are not always employed by managers.
- Taken in tandem, the research presented in this chapter should shift our perspective from the much more numerous and normative study of males, to females. By shifting our gaze to the female side, we are as likely to see the sameness of the genders as the contrasts that distinguish them (Rodriguez, 2007; Smith & Smith, 2005). We might also see that the life course of a woman or girl entangled in the criminal justice system (e.g., see Brown [2006] and E. M. Wright et al. [2007]) forms a predictable pattern that might be fruitfully addressed if we only had the will to do so.
Chapter 11: Minorities and Corrections
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- American history encompasses a racist past, which has affected the operation of correctional entities and the criminal justice system generally.
- Those who fall below the poverty line in the United States are also more likely to be enmeshed in street criminality. Some racial and ethnic groups who are more likely to be poor (e.g., African Americans and Hispanics) are also more likely to be engaged in street crime.
- Police, court, and correctional practices have had the effect of increasing the disproportionate incarceration of minority group members. Driving While Black or Brown, the drug war generally, and the harsh sentencing for crack cocaine specifically, along with the disenfranchisement that comes with a felony conviction (and in some states stays with a felony conviction) all serve to reinforce disparity in treatment by the criminal justice system of racial and ethnic minorities.
- Physical and sexual victimization in prisons varies by type of victimization and by race and ethnicity, though the total amount of such victimization appears to be similar for these groups.
- The numbers of racial and ethnic minorities working in corrections has increased substantially over the years, and for African Americans at least, it appears that they mirror their numbers in the community.
- Disproportionate incarceration of minority group members is not isolated to just the United States. Aboriginal inmates in the Victoria, Australia, prison system are also incarcerated at a much higher rate than whites in that country.
Chapter 12: Juveniles and Corrections
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- When Kids Get Life
- New Inmate
A young first timer will have a rough time in prison. - Juvenile Justice
- A Boy Among Men
- Juvenile Sentencing
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- The juvenile justice system in the United States is based on civil law and deals with status offenses (those applicable only to juveniles) and delinquency (crimes if committed by adults).
- Juveniles commit a disproportionate number of both property and violent crimes, and this has always been true across time and cultures. Recent scientific evidence relates this situation to the hormonal surges of puberty and a brain undergoing numerous changes. Although most adolescents commit antisocial acts, only a small proportion continue to do so after brain maturation is completed.
- The history of juvenile justice has three distinct periods. Originally, Western culture relied heavily on parents to control children. As society has changed, so have the expectations regarding juvenile delinquency. Institutional control of wayward youth was the model from the mid-1500s until the inception of the juvenile courts in the United States in the late 1800s/early 1900s. The juvenile court follows the doctrine of parens patriae, but recently there has been a movement away from the broad discretion formerly accorded to juvenile courts to a model more closely reflecting the constitutional protections afforded adult offenders. Much of this change has issued from the increased waivers of juveniles to adult courts and from the often arbitrary control juvenile justice authorities have exercised over juveniles.
- Much of what constitutes juvenile corrections mirrors what we have written about in other sections in this book; thus we have only briefly highlighted differences between the juvenile and adult systems. Major differences include a greater emphasis on rehabilitation as exemplified by the ratio of programming to security spent in juvenile correctional facilities and the lesser likelihood of juveniles being sent to secure facilities relative to adults.
Chapter 13: Legal Issues in Corrections
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- Inside a Death Chamber
A virtual tour of California Dept. of Corrections’ execution chamber. - Legal Lessons from Behind Bars
“Jailhouse lawyer” teaches Harvard Law students via remote feed from prison. - Capital Punishment
- Calif. Faces Tough Choices on Overcrowded Prisons
- The Death Penalty
- A Crime of Insanity
- Burden of Innocence
- Requiem for Frank Lee Smith
- Inside a Death Chamber
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- The courts have moved through three general periods with respect to inmates’ rights: the hands-off period, a short period of extending many rights to prisoners, and the current retreat to a limited hands-off policy.
- During the hands-off period, prisoners were considered slaves of the state and had no rights at all. During the period of extending prisoners’ rights, the federal courts extended a number of First, Fourth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights to them, although these rights were obviously not as extensive as they would be outside prison walls (however, inmates are the only group of Americans with a constitutional right to medical treatment).
- Because of the granting of these rights, the federal courts became clogged with section 1983 suits challenging the conditions of inmates’ confinement; some of these suits were demonstrably frivolous.
- The U.S. Congress passed the PLRA in 1996, limiting prisoner access to federal courts and loosening the grip of the courts on state correctional systems because of these excessive suits. Congress also passed the AEDPA in the same year with a rider limiting inmates’ habeas corpus rights.
- The courts have been active since the 1960s in providing rights to offenders under community supervision as well. The Supreme Court has ruled that probationers have a right to counsel at a deferred sentencing hearing, and that probationers and parolees have a right to minimal due process rights (a fair hearing to establish cause) at revocation hearings. The Court has also extended the greater search powers of probation/parole officers to police officers under certain circumstances, as we saw in the probation chapter.
- Because the United States stands almost alone among democracies in retaining the death penalty, the issue has generated much debate and numerous cases questioning its constitutionality. Two classifications of individuals (the mentally disabled and juveniles) were removed from execution eligibility in the early 2000s based on culpability issues among others.
Chapter 14: Correctional Programming and Treatment
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- Although the vast majority of the correctional budget is spent on security, rehabilitation efforts have not completely ceased. The success rates of many rehabilitation programs are low, but outcomes are significantly better for treated offenders than for similarly situated offenders who did not receive treatment.
- Successful treatment programs implement evidence-based practices that proceed by conducting a thorough assessment of offenders’ risks and needs, and then address these issues using cognitive-behavioral techniques along with the principles of responsivity. Treatment is best accomplished for severe substance abusers in therapeutic communities, although even then, there is a significant percentage of failure. Much of this failure has to do with the intense psychological craving for the substance of abuse, which is something that may be significantly alleviated by certain alcohol/drug antagonists such as naltrexone.
- Similar observations were made about sex offenders who have difficulty refraining from acting out their sexual fantasies with inappropriate targets. Repeat sex offenders treated with Depo-Provera combined with cognitive-behavioral counseling have very low recidivism rates compared with offenders treated only psychologically.
- Mentally ill individuals are represented in the correctional system by a factor of at least 3 or 4 times their prevalence in the general population. The correctional system is not equipped to deal with mentally ill people, who are often victimized by other jail/ prison inmates or disciplined by corrections officers for exhibiting behavior that is basically part of their mental disease syndromes.
Chapter 15: Corrections in the 21st Century
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- The current decarceration trend in a few states, which is apparently catching on in others, is also hopeful in that prisons can then be reserved for the truly violent and serious offenders, with the effect of increasing public safety, reducing minority community disruption, making the system “fairer” and more “just” as the punishments fit the crime, increasing the likelihood of successful reentry by offenders, and reducing the monetary costs of corrections for the public.
- Another currently popular movement, that of privatization, should give us pause, however. As a number of studies and infamous examples indicate, private prisons tend to have more problems in the decent incarceration of inmates and the level of professionalism of their staff. For these reasons, and given the susceptibility of these institutions (and state legislatures and all political entities) to corruption and profiteering, privatization of whole institutions should be reconsidered.
- As the political winds shift away from purely punishment-oriented corrections, it will be interesting to see how correctional organizations, programs, and their actors will adjust in terms of privatization, professionalism, and decarceration.