Ohio reports record-low prison inmate return rate

ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS

AP Legal Affairs Writer

COLUMBUS — The num­ber of inmates return­ing to Ohio pris­ons upon release has hit a new low, a trend the state attrib­utes to a focus on keep­ing inmates in the com­mu­nity and the involve­ment of groups that work with inmates before their release.

The drop comes even when the num­ber of peo­ple serv­ing time for drug and prop­erty offenses has risen in the state, despite efforts to reduce the num­bers of low-level offend­ers in prison.

A three-year review of inmates released in 2009 found that only 29 per­cent returned to prison, com­pared with the pre­vi­ous low of 31 per­cent, Gary Mohr, direc­tor of the Ohio Depart­ment of Reha­bil­i­ta­tion and Cor­rec­tion, said last week. That’s com­pared with the national rate of about 43 percent.

Mohr said groups that work on help­ing inmates read­just to life out­side are doing more to enter the pris­ons before­hand. The agency is being more wel­com­ing of such groups, which can include faith-based orga­ni­za­tions, halfway houses and volunteers.

“We owe a great deal to car­ing and con­cerned com­mu­nity peo­ple that have com­mit­ted to reach­ing into our pris­ons and not just wait­ing until our peo­ple are leav­ing,” Mohr said.

A 2011 law aims to save the state mil­lions of dol­lars by shrink­ing the num­ber of inmates and reduc­ing the num­ber of offend­ers who might to return to prison as repeat offenders.

Ohio’s prison pop­u­la­tion remains under 50,000 inmates, a level not seen since 2007.

The num­ber of inmates with the least seri­ous con­vic­tions, such as theft or drug abuse, rose to 20 per­cent of all admis­sions late last year, from a pre­vi­ous low of 15 percent.

The increase in the num­ber of low-level offend­ers is trou­bling in light of that law, Mohr said. He said the inmate pop­u­la­tion would be much higher if the state wasn’t also mak­ing head­way on keep­ing the return rate low.

Kansas, Michi­gan, Mis­sis­sippi, Ohio, Ore­gon, Texas and Ver­mont all saw the num­ber of repeat offend­ers drop between 2005 and 2007, accord­ing to a study last year by Washington-based Coun­cil of State Gov­ern­ments’ Jus­tice Center.

One way Ohio has low­ered its inmate pop­u­la­tion over the past year is by pro­hibit­ing judges from sen­tenc­ing first-time offend­ers to prison if the cases fall into cer­tain cat­e­gories, such as con­vic­tions involv­ing low-level felonies or if the crime was not a vio­lent offense.

But judges aren’t always happy about that. In some cases, they can’t find local treat­ment facil­i­ties or aren’t aware of them, or they say the offender has a his­tory of skip­ping out of halfway houses or sim­i­lar set­tings. In other cases, judges make it clear they think prison is war­ranted, despite the law.

In Decem­ber, the Gen­eral Assem­bly approved a change to the law backed by the Ohio Judi­cial Con­fer­ence that excludes sex offend­ers from those that judges were pro­hib­ited from send­ing to prison.

The pris­ons agency has also final­ized pro­ce­dures per­mit­ted by the 2011 sen­tenc­ing law that would allow judges to release cer­tain inmates who have served at least 80 per­cent of their prison sentence.

Posted by AP News on Feb 24 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.