Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Community-corrections agencies began in the early 1970s to replace delayed and sporadic severity with swiftness and certainty in the enforcement of conditions; the first applications focused on suppressing illicit drug use. The principle has since been used to enforce other conditions and expanded to incarcerated populations and to prisoners re-entering free society. It has also been enhanced with rewards (especially in the form of relaxed supervision) and services. Since consistent sanctioning quickly separates participants into those who find themselves able to comply in the face of immediate consequences and those who do not, service mandates can be reserved for the latter group, avoiding the imposition of services on those who do not need them. This is the principle Hawken has called “behavioral triage.”

Recent analyses have paid attention to the advantages such approaches can have in terms of subjects’ perceptions that they are being treated fairly, thus marrying Beccarian deterrence with the principles of procedural justice. That new emphasis led to the concept being labelled “Swift-Certain-Fair” (SCF). The best-known SCF program is Hawaii’s Project HOPE; the specific design of the Hawaii program (which has itself evolved over time) is sometimes conflated with the entire universe of SCF programs.

Many programs embodying SCF principles have been highly successful: Operation Tripwire (DC Pretrial); Project Sentry (Lansing, MI probation): the testing-and-sanctions track in the DC drug court experiment; HOPE itself, its contemporary SWIFT (Tarrant County, TX, probation), Swift-and-Certain (WA State probation and parole), Sobriety 24/7 (SD), in-custody SCF programs in WA, OH, and PA, and dozens of others. RESET (NY state) and Graduated Reintegration (IL) mix SCF principles (including rewards) with services in prisoner re-entry.

However, other programs intended to embody SCF principles have had disappointing results: Structured Sanctions (Multnomah County, OR, probation); Break the Cycle (MD); Decide Your Time (DE probation); and, most recently, the four-site Demonstration Field Experiment intended to replicate Hawaii HOPE. The DFE results in particular have been represented as discrediting the entire Swift-Certain-Fair project, as if failure in some places disproved success in others.

Comparing successful to unsuccessful instantiations of SCF suggests four principles that the successful programs had in common, and from which the unsuccessful programs deviated in a least one major respect:

• Sanctions credibility: consistently providing some actual sanction for every violation, or for every violation after the first.
• Behavioral triage in participant selection: choosing those with records of noncompliance, in order to avoid over-supervising those capable of complying with routine supervision.
• Parsimony in conditions, focusing on a few behaviors regarded as essential to reintegration and avoiding the use of service mandates except dictated by behavioral triage.
• Parsimony in sanctions: using the minimum dose of punishment adequate to secure compliance, eschewing escalation for repeated violations, and most of all avoiding program revocation for routine technical violations alone (as contrasted with reoffending or absconding).