States Avoid Expense By Avoiding Jail
Some states are starting to believe that the solution to problems with corrections is not to throw more money at the system. Instead, they’re talking about putting fewer people in jail. This report from National Public Radio.
“There’s this long New Hampshire tradition of tough on crime, but there’s a huge New Hampshire tradition of being pretty darn stingy,” says Chris Keating, executive director of New Hampshire’s public defender program. But being tough on crime can be expensive, and Keating says in New Hampshire, the tradition of stinginess is starting to win out. The insider term is “decriminalization.”
New Hampshire’s state Legislature is considering measures that would take away the threat of jail time for some offenses, and in the U.S., the government only has to pay for a defense lawyer when poor defendants face incarceration. So taking away the threat of jail saves money, and Keating believes New Hampshire is trying to distinguish between people society is mad at and people society is afraid of … “I think they want to move these people and cases through the system because they realize they’ve got finite resources and these cases are just bogging them down.”
William Wren, the commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Corrections, says tough budget prospects are forcing him to look at closing a whole prison and laying off 97 positions. For that reason, Wren wants fewer people sent to prison, and he is asking lawmakers to examine which crimes really deserve time behind bars. “I’ll give you a good example — our theft statutes, the threshold dollar amount for going from a misdemeanor to a felony crime is $500. That was set 31 years ago. What $500 was 31 years ago is a lot different from what it would equate to today,” he says.
These kinds of conversations are happening across the country.
Chief public defender for Massachusetts, Bill Leahy, says cuts have to come from somewhere. “We’ve got a 3 1/2 billion-dollar deficiency in Massachusetts this year, all kinds of worthy programs are being cut, and we’re continuing to waste money on prosecuting crimes that are criminal only by statute,” Leahy says …
“I think it’s a major shift,” says David Carroll, the director of research for the National Legal Aid and Defender Association. “We’ve had a hangover on the tough-on-crime movement and realize that to keep going down that path we’re only escalating costs at ever greater rates.”