Today in San Francisco, more than 50 current and former probation and parole chiefs have signed on to a new initiative designed to reduce the number of adults who are under supervision in the country’s local probation and parole systems.
About 4.5 million American adults are overseen by probation or parole departments across the county, more than twice the amount of people incarcerated in the nation’s jails and prisons. That adds up to one in 55 Americans, but racial disparities are deeply embedded in those systems — one in every 23 black people are being supervised by probation or parole departments.
The EXiT: Executives Transforming Probation and Parole initiative hopes to introduce new practices that will decrease probation and parole rolls and help probation and parole staff return to their original missions — helping men and women avoid incarceration and promoting community-based rehabilitation.
At 10:30 a.m. Pacific time, EXiT co-chairs Vincent Schiraldi, co-director of the Columbia Justice Lab and former commissioner of the New York City Department of Probation, and Barbara Broderick, chief probation officer for Maricopa County in Arizona, will field questions about the initiative, followed by a discussion with CNN Commentator Van Jones and San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón. Stay tuned here for a livestream.