EXiT Policy Aim 4

 South Carolina

South Carolina authorized an earned discharge policy through the Omnibus Crime Reduction and Sentencing Reform Act of 2010. The law established a system of incentives for individuals with a supervision term of more than one year to earn up to 20 days off for each 30-day period in which they satisfied all obligations and conditions of their sentence (Pelletier et al., 2017). As of 2015, the total number of compliance revocations decreased 46 percent since the reform’s implementation (Pelletier et al., 2017). Moreover, people who began their supervision after 2010 (2011 and beyond) were less likely than people in the FY 2010 cohort to be incarcerated or reincarcerated after one, two, and three years (Pelletier et al., 2017).

Louisiana (2017)

In 2017, Louisiana established earned time credits following the 30-for-30 model for people on probation and parole convicted of nonviolent crimes (The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2018b). Between 2016 and 2018, supervision caseloads decreased by 17 percent, enabling officers to focus their efforts on cases where individuals are most in need of support (Taylor & Harvell, 2019). 

Missouri (2012)

Missouri’s earned discharge laws are among the most comprehensive; approximately 75 percent of the state’s supervised population is eligible for earned compliance credits per the 30-for-30 policy that was established under the 2012 Justice Reinvestment Act. Within the first three years of the law’s enactment, more than 36,000 people shortened their probation and parole sentences by an average of 14 months (The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2016). Earned time credits helped reduce Missouri’s supervised population by 18 percent, or nearly 13,000 people, between August 2012 and June 2015 (The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2016), and as of June 2016, the probation population was down 21.8 percent from 2011 (Harvell & Welsh-Loveman, 2017). Consequently, the state experienced a 16 percent decrease in caseloads, with the average caseload falling from 70 to 59 cases per officer (The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2016). An analysis of Missouri’s supervised population between 2012 and 2015 showed no increase in recidivism rates in the wake of the reforms (The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2016).