Sentencing Commission Mulls Alternatives
As the nation’s inmate population climbs toward 2.5 million, the U.S. Sentencing Commission is considering alternatives to prison for some offenders, including treatment programs for nonviolent drug users and employment training for minor parole violators.
“We are leading the world in incarcerating adults, and that’s something Americans need to understand,” said Beryl Howell, one of six members of the commission, which drafts federal sentencing guidelines and advises the House and Senate on prison policy. “People should be aware that every tough-on-crime act comes with a price. The average cost [of incarceration] across the country is $24,000 a year per inmate. . . . It’s going up far faster than state budgets can keep up.”
About 2,000 drug courts nationwide spend between $1,500 and $11,000 per offender, according to the National Drug Court Institute. Those scattered courts handle only a small fraction of the 1.5 million nonviolent drug offenders who are arrested and charged with a crime, said C. West Huddleston, chief executive of the National Association of Drug Court Professionals. The courts operate under similar principles: At sentencing, a judge gives a nonviolent offender the option of going to prison or committing to a rigorous treatment program, where he or she submits to frequent tests and supervision. The aim is to reduce the 67 percent recidivism rate of addicted offenders … “Drug courts are the most successful strategy in terms of reducing crime, but they’re tremendously underutilized,” Huddleston said. “I think a Sentencing Commission recommendation to U.S. courts would create momentum. It’ll wake up state legislatures. It’s a conversation that should have been had years ago.”
Not everyone agrees, of course.
Jeffrey L. Sedgwick, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s office of justice programs, said the burgeoning prison population might be worth the cost. Research has shown that crime rates decline as the incarceration rate rises, he said. “In other words, as the number of people under correctional supervision goes up, crime goes down.” Sedgwick said the cost of housing prisoners should be weighed against other factors, such as the cost for victims of violent crimes to piece their lives back together. He said conservative estimates put the cost of violent crime at about $17 billion.
But the Justice Department is open to discussing options that might reduce prison overcrowding and costs, and is waiting to see what the commission recommends, Sedgwick said. “We’re not necessarily going to oppose it out of hand, but we say be real careful, we recommend more study,” he said.
On the other hand:
Howell said maintaining a prison population equal to the size of a major U.S. city “is inconsistent with what Congress had in mind with the Sentencing Reform Act” of 1984, which created the commission. “Our purpose is not just to issue guidelines setting forth the severity of punishment, but to provide guidelines to judges for the form of that punishment,” Howell said. “The commission has spent most of its time on the severity. It is somewhat new for us to look at the form of the punishment, and that’s where alternatives come in” …
“My experience tells me that if the drug court is properly constituted and has the buy-in of judges, prosecutors and parole officials, they are very effective,” said Tom Sneddon, interim executive director of the district attorneys group and a former Santa Barbara, Calif., prosecutor who helped establish a drug court there. “But there are some courts that are shadow programs that they use to cycle people back into society and not send them to prison, and have no real substance at all,” Sneddon said …
Texas criminal district court Judge John Creuzot said drug courts have worked in his state. He said he established a program after Texas got tough on minor drug offenders, jailing them for two years. “Well, that thing started to break down by the late 1990s,” he said, “. . . because then we had so many people in penitentiaries that we were actually letting murderers and rapists out to make room for these small violators, low-risk violators. And so we started rethinking what we were doing.” The 18-month program accepts low-level drug offenders with no felony records or histories of violence. “We did a study of that program, and we have a 68 percent reduction of recidivism in that program,” Creuzot said. “It’s a phenomenally successful program.”
The Sentencing Commission’s staff is drafting a proposal amending its guidelines that the panel could submit for public comment in late December. The commission could make a final decision by May 1. Congress would then have 180 days to reverse the decision. More details at The Washington Post.