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Imprisonment is the usual outcome when considering measures for correction and punishment for offenders. As this method is associated with a deterrence effect, it can promote the safety of the majority by isolating dangerous criminals. While incarceration is a custodial or non-community based treatment, community-based treatments may also be imposed in which offenders are able to receive supervision or participate in reparation activities while still living with their families and working or attending school. Such treatment is intended for more impulsive young offenders who are vulnerable to crime-committing situations. This chapter focuses on the issue of whether community-based treatments (CBTs)—Police Superintendent's Discretion Scheme (PSDS), Probation, and Community Service Orders(CSOs)—are indeed more humanitarian and effective.

Overlapping chronologically with the preceding chapter, chapter 4 explores a localized “punitive turn” in Chicago’s policing arrangement during the late 1940s and especially in the 1950s. Driven by grassroots pressure from white citizens, the exposure of corruption both politically and within the police department, and the rise of the famed Daley machine, police power and the size of the police department itself both expanded dramatically during this period. Once elected, Daley radically expanded the number of police officers employed by the city. Those officers were also invested with increasing amounts of discretion, leading to the expanded use of stop and frisk and other tools that disproportionately were used against Black citizens. In a department lacking meaningful accountability mechanisms, this increased discretion also led to widespread accusations against police that they were engaged in the illegal detention of citizens and also of torture. The chapter also details the early onset of the urban crisis, especially on the West Side as neighborhoods there transitioned from white to Black, and an early-1950s “war on drugs” that police waged on the Black South Side.

The Watts uprising and anti–police abuse activism ushered in a shift in politics and policing marked by Tom Bradley’s election and his commitment to liberal law-and-order policies. Focusing on the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice Planning and efforts to combat youth crime during the 1970s, this chapter shows how a combination of liberal and conservative politicians and criminal justice officials focused on reforming a juvenile justice system they believed to be too lenient on youth offenders. By posing rehabilitation and diversion as alternatives to arrest and imprisonment, they provided the police with new discretionary authority to enter social institutions to supervise youth of color. In doing so, the police created new anti-gang units, such as the Community Resources against Street Hoodlums (CRASH) units and drug bust programs to monitor youth of color.

The paradigm of the armed and dangerous mass killer in public opinion and legislation is a homicidal-suicidal stranger hunting in public. Yet half of all firearms-related homicides take place in the home, typically among intimates and people known to the slain. Drawing on data from the National Violent Death Reporting System, this chapter shows that even in the context of extraordinary violence by the homicidal-suicidal, the major early red flags and risk factors involve seemingly ordinary smaller-scale assaults and domestic disturbances. Firearms laws prevent individuals convicted of crimes of domestic violence or under court-issued restraining orders from possessing firearms. The problem is that many perpetrators never come to the attention of a court. Based on these findings regarding what current legal screens miss, this chapter discusses how police discretion and scene-of the-assault procedure for “ordinary” domestic violence can help prevent escalation to the feared extraordinary violence of homicidal-suicidal mass killings.