Fixing the parole system

The US is planning to release about 600,000 criminals from prison in 2008 who will begin various types of official supervision such as parole. Crime rates in the US have fallen to about half since their highs in the early 1990s, while in homicide,it retains has the highest rates in the developed world. The failure of parole and other forms of post-incarceration supervision has contributed to crime and increase the size of the prison population, and more effective parole could enable the nation to have less crime and less incarceration. The use of scarce punishment capacity more economically by stressing certainty over severity, increasing its efficacy by shortening the time between violation and response, and directly communicating the preventive threat to potential violators can all tend to reduce the critical value of sanctions capacity and minimize the cost of moving from high violation, low punishment risk to low violation, and high punishment risk.