The report from the Justice Center and the Pew Center on the states that Indiana Republican Governor Mitch Daniels recently endorsed contains a number of good recommendations for reducing the prison population, including more flexibility in sentencing, discouraging prison time for low-level felonies, and reorienting resources towards the most dangerous offenders. But it also recommends adopting the "swift and certain sanctions" approach on probation pioneered by the HOPE program in Hawaii, which Mark Kleiman studied in his book, When Brute Force Fails:
Researchers evaluating these policy changes have found that the Georgia policy reduced the number of days that probationers spent in jail on violations or awaiting court hearings by 70 percent.43 The Hawaii program reduced re-arrest rates by 55 percent, re-arrest rates for drug use by 72 percent, and rates of probation revocations to prison by 53 percent.
The Pew Center on the States did its own study on the HOPE program, which is where these results are from. The report recommends putting lower risk offenders on probation after release while keeping more dangerous offenders under parole supervision when released. It's easy to imagine the cumulative impact that dramatically lower rate of drug use could have on low-level drug offenders and people who commit crimes in pursuit of money for drugs. Daniels' office claims the proposed changes will help the state save $1.2 billion in prison costs.
The fiscal argument in favor of criminal justice reform has shown itself to be pretty persuasive among some conservatives, but the risk is that some methods of closing the budget gap can actually make the problem worse--namely the sort of draconian "user fees" I describe in my piece for this month's special report on mass incarceration. The basic point is that when someone comes out of prison in debt, the temptation to seek money through illicit means becomes stronger.
Bobby Constantino at the Vera Institute has written a post where he recommends waiving these kinds of fees as part of a rewards system for prisoners who do well in rehabilitative and skill-building programs, which seems like an easy way to lessen their impact and nudge people coming out of prison into developing the kind of habits that can help prevent them from recidivating.
