Response to Duriez, Cullen, and Manchak: Theory and Evidence on the Swift-Certain-Fair Approach to Enforcing Conditions of Community Supervision

The authors respond to Duriez et al.'s caveats about Project HOPE by arguing that swift-certain-fair (SCF) sanctioning improves on conventional practice in enforcing the conditions for community corrections both by substituting swiftness and certainty for severity and by increasing the predictability, and thus the perceived fairness, of the process from the offender's viewpoint. SCF has both firm theoretical grounding and a growing body of empirical support, making it a useful complement or substitute for expensive and laborious formal risk-needs assessments.