Thinning the prison herd

“We stick them in prison next to a mur­derer and a rapist. That’s really made a lot of sense here in Ohio to be doing that, didn’t it?”

— Gov­er­nor John Kasich

“House Bill 86 rep­re­sents a pos­i­tive step for­ward, but our bro­ken crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem demands fast, fun­da­men­tal changes to thin our bloated prisons.”

— James L. Hardi­man, Legal Direc­tor ACLU of Ohio

It’s not often that a Repub­li­can Gov­er­nor and an ACLU legal direc­tor are in agree­ment on some­thing. It’s even rarer if that agree­ment is over a crim­i­nal jus­tice reform bill. Such are the strange times in which we find our­selves in Ohio. The bill was House Bill 86 and its pro­vi­sions enact broad and sweep­ing reforms of crim­i­nal and juve­nile justice.

Not since the com­plete over­haul of crim­i­nal jus­tice that was enacted in 1996 has an omnibus bill had such a broad impact on crim­i­nal law in Ohio. The pro­vi­sions will affect who will go to prison, how long they will stay there and how much it will cost us as tax­pay­ers to fund the crim­i­nal jus­tice system.

Sev­eral pro­vi­sions of the bill are intended to reduce the num­ber of adults who will find their way into the prison sys­tem, instead direct­ing them into com­mu­nity super­vi­sion pro­grams. First, the bill increases the value that stolen items must reach in order for a theft offense to cross the thresh­old from a mis­de­meanor to a felony. Infla­tion made the change nec­es­sary in order to pre­vent minor theft offenses from being pun­ished with a poten­tial prison term.

Sec­ond, the bill pro­vides guid­ance for courts that offend­ers who are con­victed of fail­ing to pay their child sup­port should be kept in the com­mu­nity so that they may be super­vised in the pay­ment of their sup­port oblig­a­tion, but also pro­vides new direc­tion as to cir­cum­stances under which the impo­si­tion of prison terms would be appro­pri­ate for that offense. Third, the bill evens out penal­ties for offenses related to crack cocaine and pow­der cocaine so that the dis­par­ity between them is removed.

Fourth, the bill expands the num­ber of offend­ers who are eli­gi­ble for what is called “treat­ment in lieu of con­vic­tion”. These offend­ers are mon­i­tored in com­pre­hen­sive treat­ment pro­grams and face the pos­si­bil­ity of prison sen­tences if they do not com­ply with their treat­ment. Other changes were made in rela­tion to the offense of escape, to manda­tory drug penal­ties and to how mul­ti­ple prison sen­tences are cal­cu­lated. Those changes are also aimed at reduc­ing the prison pop­u­la­tion and pro­vid­ing com­mu­nity treat­ment and support.

Yet other pro­vi­sions of the bill affect the length of time that inmates will remain in prison if they are sen­tenced to a period of con­fine­ment. These pro­vi­sions include increas­ing the amount of “earned credit” an inmate can accu­mu­late toward the com­ple­tion of their sen­tence and a com­pletely new sys­tem in which the Direc­tor of the Depart­ment of Reha­bil­i­ta­tion and Cor­rec­tion can make a request for the early release of a prison who has served 80% of their prison term. That request would go to the sen­tenc­ing court for consideration.

In the juve­nile sys­tem, the pro­vi­sion affects the bind-over of juve­niles into the adult sys­tem, widens the period of time dur­ing which a juve­nile court can order the early release of a child who was com­mit­ted to state cus­tody for the com­mis­sion of a felony and, for the first time, estab­lishes a statu­tory pro­ce­dure for juve­nile courts to fol­low in order to deter­mine whether a child is com­pe­tent to stand trial in the juve­nile system.

These reforms will, by design, lead to crim­i­nals who were for­merly incar­cer­ated instead remain­ing in local com­mu­ni­ties. The hope of both polit­i­cal par­ties, how­ever, is that in so doing those crim­i­nals will receive assis­tance that will pre­vent them from com­mit­ting future crimes and will reduce the over­all cost of a prison sys­tem that was burst­ing at the seams. A full analy­sis of House Bill 86 can be found online at the web­site of the Ohio Leg­isla­tive Ser­vice Com­mis­sion, lsc.state.oh.us.

David Hej­manowski is a mag­is­trate and court admin­is­tra­tor of the Delaware County Juve­nile Court. He served as a mem­ber of the com­mit­tee that drafted the juve­nile com­pe­tency pro­vi­sions even­tu­ally included as part of House Bill 86.

Posted by Dave Hejmanowski on Jun 30 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.