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8.5: Community Corrections

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    Community corrections is a system imposed by the court on individuals who have committed a crime in which they serve all or part of their sentence or sanction through community-based placements and programs as an alternative to incarceration. Like incarcerated corrections, community corrections have similar goals: to promote public safety, to administer punishment, and to rehabilitate individuals, but unlike incarcerated corrections, this is done in a very different way.

    Diversion

    Diversion is a process whereby an individual, at some stage, is routed away from continuing on in the formal justice process. Diversion is an action that would effectively keep a person in the community and, in some cases, out of the criminal justice system altogether.

    Diversion can come as early as the initial contact with a law enforcement officer. The discretion an officer uses could be considered a diversion, as the officer decides whether the individual needs to continue on the justice path. It could be a verbal warning, a warning ticket, or just a decision by the officer not to issue a formal ticket (citation).

    Officers may also recognize that the person has a need that is not being fulfilled and thus identify an underlying reason the person may be committing a crime. For example, a person is trespassing on someone else’s property to find a place to sleep. The officer has the legal authority to issue a citation for trespass if the property owner allows and thus arrests the person, but the underlying issue may be the person’s housing needs.

    Diversion can also be more formal. For instance, a diversion can be issued by a judge in lieu of a judgment or as a condition of a judgment. In a formal diversion process, a judge could offer a person the chance to complete a diversion program in place of a sentence, making it a condition of the judgment. For example, a person who committed a crime due to a substance abuse problem. The judge could offer the person substance abuse treatment and then effectively nullify the judgment once the person has successfully completed the diversion. In the figure below, you will find a graph outlining how diversion could be applied at various points in the justice system.

    clipboard_eeb6d199f5f621e9ee596c9182140e4d6.png
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): The Justice System flow chart with various diversion options is noted along the path.

    It is difficult to know the exact number of diversions that occur in the United States, especially across the variety of places where diversion can occur. It is also difficult to determine if there are inequities in how diversions are applied across populations. These diversion options could save the courts or corrections systems hundreds of millions of dollars and keep individuals in the community instead of incarcerating them. For further details, consult the Prison Policy Initiative article, Building exits off the highway of mass-incarceration: Diversion programs explained [Website], to learn many of the ways diversion can be implemented to address incarceration issues nationally.

    This page titled 8.5: Community Corrections was last modified on Sat, 26 Sep 2026 19:45:03 GMT and is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Antoniette Aizon.