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Alm worked with Kevin Takata, a supervisor in the prosecutor's office, to come up with a form that reduced the paperwork time for demanding a probation modification from hours or days to minutes. And rather than require a complete overhaul of the terms of a violator's probation, the judge simply handed down jail time. In practice, the sentences were not especially long—days or weeks, in most cases—but, as Kleiman argues, it was not the duration of punishment but the certainty that was crucial.
The results of Alm's program, called Hawaii's Opportunity Probation with Enforcement, or HOPE, astonished everyone. The probationers shaped up quickly, and over time they showed remarkably little inclination to go astray. The urine tests came back dirty a tenth as often as before. "We discovered that most of these guys can stop using on their own," Alm explained, given the discipline imposed by HOPE. For most probationers, the strict observation was as good as, or better than, any drug-treatment program. It generally took no more than one stint in jail before an offender realized that the consequences of a relapse were real; second violations were unusual. And according to a study co-authored by Kleiman, recidivism—that is, arrests for the commission of new crimes, rather than just violations of probation—dropped by half.
Alm was inherently skeptical that prison is the appropriate remedy for many types of offenses. "You don't want to send a 20-year-old who's driving a stolen car and has a little dope on him when he's caught to prison," he said. "He's not going to come out better. I belong to the school of judge-thought that says we should be sending to prison the people we are afraid of, or who won't stop stealing."