Incarceration Nation

How to Cut the Prison Population (See for Yourself)

When Barack Obama, the Koch Brothers, the American Civil Liberties Union and Newt Gingrich all agree on an issue, you know that something important may be happening.

And you also know that there must be a catch, or maybe three.

“Criminal justice reform” — cutting back on a rate of incarceration that jumped fourfold in four decades — has become a bipartisan buzzword. Many people of different political stripes agree that too many Americans are being imprisoned for too long, with too little rehabilitation, consuming public budgets and hollowing out African-American communities in particular.

Although the number of people held in state and federal prisons appears to have leveled off at about 1.6 million — 2.2 million if those in local jails are counted — some scholars and activists are calling for far more ambitious change. They ask: Why not reduce the prison population by a quarter or even by half? (That would still leave it far higher than it was a few decades back, when crime was more rampant than today.)...

A new interactive “prison population forecaster,” posted online Tuesday by the Urban Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington, aims to help fill that void and yields some sobering conclusions:

http://webapp.urban.org/reducing-mass-incarceration/index.html

The interactive program allows you to assess for yourself the impact of different policy changes. Cut in half the sentences for those convicted of property crimes? Inmates in 2021 are down by 10 percent.

What surprised me most in using the tool, as one who has followed the debate on criminal reform, is just how hard it will be to turn back the clock and achieve deep reductions in incarceration. Traffic tickets for pot smokers won’t take us there, and neither will making petty thieves sweep sidewalks or retroactively ending the wildly disparate sentences for crack possession...

There is no avoiding the politically poisonous question of releasing violent offenders or reducing their long sentences. “We need to start what’s going to be a long and difficult conversation about violent crime,” Mr. King said.

I was startled by these calculations for New Jersey, for example: Cutting in half the number of people sent to prison for drug crimes would reduce the prison population at the end of 2021 by only 3 percent. By contrast, cutting the effective sentences, or time actually served, for violent offenders by just 15 percent would reduce the number of inmates in 2021 by 7 percent — more than twice as much, but still hardly the revolution many reformers seek.

New Jersey could reduce its prison population by 25 percent by 2021. But to do it, it would have to take the politically fraught step of cutting in half the effective sentences for violent offenders.

In other words, the real debate over how to deal with criminals has hardly begun. And that debate will inevitably have to be argued state by state on terms that may well cause the bipartisan agreement on the need for change, focused on nonviolent offenders, to break down...

The inescapable facts revealed to anyone using with the Urban Institute tool: Big cuts in incarceration must come at the state level, and they will have to involve rethinking of sentences for violent criminals

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/upshot/how-to-cut-the-prison-population-see-for-yourself.html

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3903067&forum_id=2#35480012)

and if they are in there for "drugs" it's because they violated the terms of their probation or supervised release for a more serious crime and get locked up.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3903067&forum_id=2#35480272)