This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 6, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

For people to reintegrate or remain integrated in society after a prison sentence or a conviction,

current probation and parole policies aren't serving the public particularly well,

and the research is showing us ways to fix it.

Mark Levin is Vice President for Criminal Justice Policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

We spoke last week in Colorado Springs.

For people who didn't go to jail, but were convicted of something, a lot of them get probation.

What does that look like?

Well, there's a lot of conditions in most places on people on probation in terms of you can't leave the county without permission you can't

drink alcohol you obviously have to report to a probation officer frequently drug testing and so forth and

of course you know there's a need for some conditions and need for

accountability but I think in many jurisdictions we've gone too far with a whole

laundry list of dozens of conditions that aren't correlated to the person's

offense or their risk factors and so what we found is through the research that

actually focusing the supervision to narrowly tailor to the individual's issues, that that is much more effective than just a laundry list of conditions.

And the other thing is people are at many places are on probation for too long 10 15 in Minnesota 40

years on probation and all the data has shown if someone's going to mess up if

they're going to be be arrested it's typically going to be in the first year

or two so there's little or no

public safety benefit to lengthy terms of probation and then finally addressing the

issues of revocation half the people that come into our prisons across the country are people that were revoked from probation or parole.

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