Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Swift, certain, and fair (SCF) is an approach to community supervision of criminal offenders that employs rapid, modest responses to every violation of a short list of supervision conditions (Hawken, Davenport, & Kleiman 2014). SCF is now in use in pretrial supervision, probation, and parole in jurisdictions in more than twenty states. Most SCF implementations, as typified by HOPE probation in Hawaii and many replications on the mainland, use short stays in jail (or equivalent facilities) as their default sanction. A large body of evidence in criminal justice and behavioral science suggests that, when punishments are swift and certain, the returns to severity rapidly diminish (Paternoster 1989; Farabee 2005). Several SCF implementations are now testing non-jail sanctions, both custodial and noncustodial: courthouse lockups, halfway houses, day reporting centers, work release, electronic home monitoring, community service, and stipulated agreements. We review the alternative sanctions in use and assess their effectiveness in motivating offender compliance. We report preliminary findings from a randomized controlled trial of a day-reporting center SCF sanction versus supervision as usual in probation in a large, urban Midwestern county; and from a quasi-experiment of jail vs. non-jail custodial sanctions in rural counties in a Midwestern state.