County fights crime by decreasing repeat offenders
New and more effective programs and treatment for criminal offenders can help reduce crime, rehabilitate offenders and protect citizens.
Since 2012 the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office has put in place innovative approaches that give a second chance to first-time felony offenders and those dealing with addiction.
As these efforts reduce the number of offenders going to prison, they have helped us forge closer relationships among prosecutors, law enforcement and the communities we serve.
For eight years now, the County Attorney’s Office has offered a second chance for drug treatment to those with a prior drug conviction. This program has worked by acknowledging that relapse is a part of addiction. That’s not all.
A pretrial intervention program begun in 2015 gives first-time felony offenders who don’t face drug charges a similar chance to earn dismissal of their charges by paying restitution and completing programs designed to reduce future crime.
The intervention program has now grown to over 1,000 participants. It has been so successful that only 4.2% of participants have reoffended over the life of the program. In comparison, our statewide historical rate for offenders in just the first year of release is 38%.
Treatment and intervention programs help people overcome issues that lead to crime. They further lead to fewer felony convictions and reduce the number of offenders going to prison due to continued criminal activity.
To consolidate and better manage our diversion programs, we created a Diversion Program Bureau in 2018, led by a supervisor with a master’s degree in social work that reflects a rehabilitative vision for our programs and incorporates rigorous data analysis to track program performance.
As a result, we can now effectively monitor how third-party providers are performing, track results, and ensure specific offender needs are being met.
We put in place a community-based approach to prosecution in 2017, in which we assigned teams of prosecutors to specific parts of Maricopa County to emphasize and build relationships with the communities we serve.
With our partners, we recently focused on the area of 19th Avenue and Camelback Road. There residents had alerted law enforcement of a spike in criminal activity. Using our collaborative model, we achieved a 15% reduction in crime in the first six months.
This model puts a spotlight on the drivers of crime in each community, such as specific offenders or environmental circumstances such as vacant houses or burned-out streetlights.
We have developed real-time and effective crime-reduction strategies that don’t force us to wait for annual reports to tell us what residents already know.
When diversion or probation has not worked to deter an offender, incarceration may be needed to protect the public. But it is used sparingly.
During fiscal year 2011, Maricopa County sentenced 8,004 offenders to prison. In 2017, it was 5,550, a 30% decrease. If those 2,454 fewer inmates had served an average sentence of three years at a cost of $25,000 per year, that’s an incarceration savings of $184 million, not to mention fewer victims. Statewide, there was a 12% decrease over the same timeframe.
Working in partnership with dedicated county supervisors and fellow county officials, legislators and governors, we’ve created conditions for continued success to provide second chances to offenders, enhance public safety for residents and reduce the use of prison.