Saturday, August 05, 2006

Why "Corrections Sentencing"?

Given the time and energy it takes to do a blog worth reading regularly, you might wonder why we did "Corrections Sentencing" at all. The name part is easy--the two words should draw folks from search engines hitting either or both. The content part is harder.

As participants in corrections and/or sentencing policy for over a decade now, we've found the lack of constant, consistent forums for practitioners, policymakers, and the public to seriously review and discuss what's happening a problem. I've regularly gotten questions from people in other states wanting to know about sentencing commissioning and treatment research and cost-effectiveness and on and on. The same is true, I'm sure, for a lot of you regarding sentencing or questions in corrections. While there are good special interest blogs on particular topics or issues and institutional websites, there hasn't been anything to parallel (much less come close to) what Doug Berman does every day with his unrivaled Sentencing Law and Policy for non-law school sentencing and corrections types.

That situation should not be so. There should be a place for corrections/sentencing policy readers seeking latest information and research, answers to questions and concerns, or just general conversation on shared worlds. That's what this blog will try to be. We'll try to keep "politics" to a minimum (good luck to us on that, we realize, but Berman has pretty much pulled it off). But we will not shy away from relevant discussions of what both reality and illusion tell us about getting sentencing done with corrections in mind.

We encourage you to help us make a community here of people who can support each other in making their corrections and sentencing policy the best informed and organized they can be. We want to hear your experiences and to share your knowledge with others. We want you to find answers to specific questions here and to provide answers to others. We want to be a place you want to visit regularly, for the info, for the ideas, for the company. We'll post open threads so you can let us know in your comments what we need to do to get all this done. And if it turns out people don't really need this very much, at least someone will have made the effort. We don't think that will be the case.

So. Let's get started. Let us know what you think, what you need, what you want. It's as easy as posting a comment at the bottom of an entry. Let's see what this can be.

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