When the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015 was introduced in the United States Congress last year, Republican and Democratic senators backed the ambitious bill. Experts complimented its call for changes to mandatory minimums and solitary confinement and its proposal to thin the federal prisonpopulation.
Lost in the praise, however, was a section that would radically change how the Bureau of Prisons tries to prevent recidivism. A proposed program instructs the U.S. attorney general to establish what the bill calls a “post-sentencing risk- and needs-assessment system” for federal prisoners, which would assign inmates a low, moderate, or high score based on their likelihood of recidivism. “Dynamic risk factors”—including “indicators of progress and improvement, and of regression, including newly acquired skills, attitude, and behavior changes over time”—would determine the ratings.
[For more of this story, written by Chris Haugh, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...n-recidivism/488741/]
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