Another way to deal with budget cuts: let prisoners out early

I wasn't aware of this phenomenon before, but commenter tomdurk called Blast Off! Radio today and told me about states being forced to release prison inmates early -- sometimes with as little as 25% of their sentences completed -- because of the drastic budget cuts being forced on them by their state legislatures. According to tomdurk, Florida was one of the pioneers in this process, recognizing as early as twenty years ago that certain inmates would respond better to early release and continuing treatment as opposed to being locked up in prison ... which costs the state far more than letting them go.

"It's the fiscal stuff that's driving it," said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group that advocates for more lenient sentencing. "Do you want to build prisons or do you want to build colleges? If you're a governor, it's kind of come to that choice right now."

Mauer and other observers point to a number of recent actions, some from states facing huge budget shortfalls, some not, but still worried about exploding costs.

· To ease the overcrowding and save California about $1.1 billion over two years, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) has proposed freeing about 22,000 prisoners convicted of nonviolent, nonsexual offenses 20 months earlier than their scheduled release dates. He also wants to place them on unsupervised parole, saving the state the cost of having all parolees assigned to an agent.

· Lawmakers in Providence, R.I., approved an expansion last week of the state's "good time" early-release rules to cover more inmates serving shorter sentences. The new rules, which will put more inmates under post-prison supervision, are expected to save Rhode Island an estimated $8 billion over five years.

· In Kentucky, where 22,000 state inmates are housed in county prisons and private facilities, lawmakers agreed to allow certain nonviolent, nonsexual offenders to serve up to 180 days of their sentences at home, and to make it easier for prisoners to earn credit for good behavior. The move could save the state, which is facing a $900 million deficit over the next two years, as much as $30 million.

· In Mississippi, where the prison population has doubled during the past dozen years to 22,600, Gov. Haley Barbour (R) has signed into law two measures that will reduce it: One to let certain nonviolent offenders go free after serving 25 percent of their sentences, and the other to release some terminally ill inmates.

· South Carolina, meanwhile, is looking to abolish parole, in part to slow the growth of its prison population since there would be fewer people returned to prison for parole violations.

Predictably, opponents charge that convicted criminals should not be released early under any circumstances, but the longterm effects of years of mandatory sentencing laws have included bloated prison populations and skyrocketing costs for the states.

This is not an area about which I know very much, I admit, but the relevance of the article cannot be underemphasized in a state like Florida, where the fiscal woes show no signs of abating. It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that the Republican leaders in America's Wang™ would rather spend money on prisons than schools. We can only hope that our next election can bring us legislators whose heads are not lodged irretrievably up their asses.