S Manager - Criminal Justice Partnership Program Grant Application

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1 CRIMINAL JUSTICE PARTNERSHIP PROGRAM--NC DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTION COUNTY COMMUNITY-BASED CORRECTIONS PLAN PAGE ONE OF SECTION A - - LOCAL POLICY DEVELOPMENT (See reverse for detailed instructions.) 1. Highlight your local advisory board's discussion of local sentencing policy for targeting offenders in the structured sentencing grid in your jurisdiction. a) Describe any cell-by-cell analysis of the sentencing grid completed to date by your local advisory board. b) What plans does your board have to continue to encourage cell-by-cell decision making at the local level. c) In broad terms, list your comprehensive plan's goals and objectives as they relate to the sentencing grid. In other words, what goals does you local advisory board have to encourage the formulation of local policies to enhance the working of the sentencing grid? The Orange-Chatham Criminal Justice Partnership Advisory Board used both an experiential and analytical approach for targeting offenders. In the experiential method, the nominal group process was used to draw upon the everyday experiences of the board membership to identify characteristics of offenders. This approach allowed the group to engage in a substantive discussion around the question — "What are the causes of crime and recidivism in the community?" The group generated a list of 26 elements that they believed to cause crime and recidivism. The top 5 elements, in priority order, as identified by the advisory board were: (1) Substance Abuse (2) Poverty (3) Lack of Job Opportunity (4) Alienation/Lack of Community Support (5) Lack of Educational Opportunity These elements were germane to the programs upon which the advisory board finally decided to develop and implement. The advisory board also used an analytical approach to targeting offenders using extensive data collection to guide the formulation of distinct profiles of offenders to be served by programs/services in the criminal justice continuum. Part of the data analysis included a cell by cell analysis of the total number of felony sentencing episodes for Orange and Chatham Counties for FY 92-93 (see Table I) and the number of felony sentencing episodes in FY 92-93 which would have received community or intermediate sanctions, under structured sentencing (see Table II). This data was supplied by the State Criminal Justice Partnership Research Staff.