All Parole

Understanding Decarceration: A Shift in Criminal Justice Reform

Julie Truschel February 17, 2025

In my ongoing exploration of alternatives to incarceration, I recently came across the term decarceration. While I stay up to date on criminal justice terminology and the meaning seems clear from its parts, it wasn’t in my dictionary and I had never heard it used explicitly as the opposite of incarceration. So, where did it come from, and what exactly does it mean? The term decarceration first emerged in the

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The Importance of Alternatives to Incarceration

Julie Truschel April 8, 2024

At the SAW Project, we promote the sharing of successful community-based supervision practices that keep people out of jails and prisons, while still holding them accountable for misdeeds.  Research has shown that people can be effectively monitored in the community rather than be incarcerated.[1] Whether this supervision is prior to adjudication (pre-trial) or post-conviction (direct sentence/early release on probation/parole), these alternatives to incarceration are vital to sustainable corrections systems.  As

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