Advanced Supervised Release

The Justice Reinvestment Act (S.L. 2011-192) creates a new program called Advanced Supervised Release (ASR).  Through it, certain inmates will be eligible for release from prison before serving their minimum sentence. According to literature prepared by the Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center, a non-profit group that helped develop the legislation, the purpose of ASR is to “[p]rovide incentives for people incarcerated to complete programs that would reduce the likelihood of that person reoffending.” Justice Reinvestment in North Carolina: Analysis and Policy Framework to Reduce Spending on Corrections and Reinvest in Strategies to Increase Public Safety, 17. This post summarizes the law and examines some of its technicalities. (Note: House Bill 335, which has been ratified by the General Assembly but not yet signed into law by the governor, makes some technical corrections to the ASR law. This post assumes those technical corrections will become law, but if that doesn’t happen I’ll let you know and amend the post accordingly.) Effective for defendants who enter a plea or are found guilty on or after January 1, 2012, new G.S. 15A-1340.18 allows a sentencing judge, without objection from the prosecutor, to order the Department of Correction to admit an eligible defendant into the ASR program. The law requires DOC to release the defendant on a predetermined ASR date if he or she completes certain risk reduction incentives while in prison (or is unable to complete them through no fault of his or her own). DOC may only admit to ASR those [...]