The current effort to encourage employing probationers and parolees, collectively known as the District 39 Empowerment Project, is part of a wider effort in our state to encourage the rehabilitation of those who pose the lowest threat to public safety in Missouri.
That effort was launched about five years ago with the formation of Missouri Sentencing Advisory Commission (SAC), which recommends sentences based upon the offenders level of risk to re-offend and rehabilitative needs. Judge Michael A. Wolff, who chairs the MSAC and currently sits on the Missouri Supreme Court, has observed, “We have not reserved the spaces in prison for the most dangerous and most likely to repeat. We have, in fact, thrown the net more widely and included many more offenders who, after prison, will be more likely to commit crimes than they were before they went to prison...If we are to think rationally about what is in our own best interest—that is, public safety—we should try to determine what reduces recidivism [i.e., the rate of re-offending]...Prison should be reserved for those we fear, not those we are mad at.”
- See today's LCL for the full story
