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Abstract: 

Yeager shows that private-sector initiatives that focus resources on diverting jail-bound offenders are likely to encounter active destabilization efforts on behalf of threatened bureaucracies. The author further suggests that such destabilization may, in fact, be a criterion of the program's effectiveness in diverting the serious, prison-bound offender. Further, Yeager suggests that alternative sentencing programs are, by definition, paradigm shifts that threaten the ideological and economic underpinning of existing criminal justice systems. Hence, their success, if any, may be a function of the degree to which such programs can secure political support from various power centers in the community.

Keywords: alternative dispositions

Affiliations:  1: University of Western Ontario, Canada.