Vermont
Step 4: Measure the impact and enhance accountability.
To track various agencies’ implementation of the activities that the new law prescribes, and to determine their impact on the prison population, the legislature commissioned several studies and tasked the Joint Corrections Oversight Committee with reviewing these reports and presenting each before the legislature:
- The DOC and the state court administrator will issue a report on the implementation of the screening and assessment program and provide recommendations for continuing and/or expanding the program. Additionally, the state court administrator, in consultation with several state agencies including the DOC and the Department of Health, will report on the operating costs and cost savings of the screening and assessment pilot program.
- The Joint Fiscal Office and the Office of Finance and Management will collaborate to evaluate the fiscal impact of the bill on state corrections expenditures. These state agencies will report to the legislature annually.
- The DOC will report on the effectiveness of efforts to increase inmate participation in substance abuse treatment programs and reduce by 10 percent the number of revocations to prison for persons on conditional reentry, a community supervision program that requires participants to participate in a reentry program while completing their sentence in the community.
The Vermont Center for Justice Research, the state’s criminal justice Statistical Analysis Center, will evaluate the effectiveness of the Administrative Probation Program, including whether program participants commit new offenses and the nature of those offenses.