NCJ Number
247372
Date Published
January 2013
Length
20 pages
Annotation
This brief report highlights justice reinvestment efforts in Kansas.
Abstract
This report from the Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center highlights Kansas's justice reinvestment efforts. These efforts are aimed at reducing the State's spending on corrections and reinvesting these savings in strategies that have been shown to increase public safety. The CSG Justice Center analyzed data from the Kansas Department of Corrections, the State's judicial branch, the State's sentencing commission, and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. In addition, the CSG Justice Center conducted focus groups and meetings with corrections administrators and staff, prosecutors, victim advocates, service providers, and law enforcement personnel to obtain input from these various stakeholders. This report provides a summary of the findings from the analyses and the meetings and offers a set of policy options organized around three objectives - stronger probation supervision, successful reentry, and safer communities. The policy options include allowing probation officers to prioritize higher-risk cases and reduce the length of supervision time for successful, lower-risk probationers; enabling probation officers to apply swift and certain responses to people under felony supervision who commit technical violations; increasing access to community-based programming for people on post-release supervision that are at a higher risk of reoffending; allowing resources to be focused on higher-risk cases and reducing the length of time on post-release supervision; providing law enforcement agencies with competitive grant funding for initiatives that help them analyze crime data and improve their responses to persons with mental illness; and enhancing the State's Bureau of Investigation's ability to process crime scene evidence and apprehend and prosecute individuals. Tables, figures