Pubdate: Sun,  2 Sep 2001
Source: New York Times (NY)
Section: In Depth, Crime
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Author: Fox Butterfield

STATES EASING STRINGENT LAWS ON PRISON TIME

Reversing a 20-year trend toward ever-tougher criminal laws, a number of 
states this year have quietly rolled back some of their most stringent 
anticrime measures, including those imposing mandatory minimum sentences 
and forbidding early parole.

The new laws, along with a voter initiative in California that provides for 
treatment rather than prison for many drug offenders, reflect a political 
climate that has changed markedly as crime has fallen, the cost of running 
prisons has exploded and the economy has slowed, state legislators and 
criminal justice experts say.

After a two-decade boom in prison construction that quadrupled the number 
of inmates, the states now spend a total of $30 billion a year to operate 
their prisons, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. And with 
voters saying they are more concerned about issues like education than 
street violence, state legislators are finding they must cut the growth in 
prison inmates to satisfy the demand for new services and to balance their 
budgets.

"I think these new laws are pretty significant, with legislators taking 
politically risky steps that would have been unthinkable even a couple of 
years ago," said Michael Jacobson, a former corrections commissioner for 
New York City who is now a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

"When the spigot stops, you are forced to look at the items that have grown 
the most, and inevitably, in every state, it is corrections," Professor 
Jacobson said.

With several states re-examining their criminal laws, including New York, 
Alabama, Georgia, New Mexico and Idaho, these changes are likely to hasten 
a decline in the number of state prison inmates, which began to fall in the 
second half of last year for the first time since 1972, the experts and 
lawmakers say.

Perhaps the most significant changes, the experts say, occurred in four 
states that this year dropped some 1990's sentencing laws that required 
criminals to serve long terms without the possibility of parole. The four 
are Louisiana, Connecticut, Indiana and North Dakota.

Iowa passed a similar law last spring, giving judges discretion in imposing 
what had been a mandatory five-year sentence for low-level drug crimes and 
certain property crimes, including burglary.

In May, Mississippi passed a law making first-time nonviolent offenders 
eligible for parole after serving only 25 percent of their sentences, 
instead of the 85 percent required under a law enacted in 1994. Since the 
earlier law went into effect, the number of prison inmates in Mississippi 
jumped to 37,754 this year, from 10,699 in 1994, according to state figures.

And West Virginia, which has had one of the fastest-growing prison systems, 
enacted a law to reduce the number of inmates by giving money to local 
counties to develop alternatives to prison, like electronic monitoring of 
people on probation and centers where probationers would report each day.

"These may be small states, and the new laws are not comprehensive reforms, 
but it is very significant that these are not just liberal Northeastern 
states," said Nicholas Turner, director of the State Sentencing and 
Corrections Project at the Vera Institute of Justice in New York, a 
research organization that is working with a number of the states to reduce 
prison costs and explore options instead of prison. "What has happened this 
year in these states implies a lot about a change in the political culture."

Some lawmakers and lobbyists say such a shift is looming in New York, where 
Gov. George E. Pataki has proposed softening the state's notoriously tough 
Rockefeller-era drug laws, and the Democratic-controlled State Assembly has 
insisted on even more far-reaching changes.

Perhaps the most surprising change has come in Louisiana, which has the 
highest per capita incarceration rate in the nation and has long had a 
reputation for brutal prison conditions and wide racial disparities in who 
is sentenced to prison.

Louisiana's new law, strongly supported by Gov. Mike Foster, a conservative 
Republican, and the state district attorneys' association, eliminates 
mandatory prison time for crimes like burglary of a residence, possession 
of small amounts of drugs, Medicaid fraud, prostitution, theft of a firearm 
and obscenity. Since Louisiana imposed mandatory minimum sentences six 
years ago, its prison population has increased by 50 percent, to 38,000 
from 25,260, and was projected to grow to 46,000 by 2004. Under mandatory 
minimum sentences, state expenditures for prisons have soared 70 percent, 
state figures show.

"This is an attempt to bring under control a system that was bankrupting 
the state and was not reducing crime," said State Senator Donald R. 
Cravins, a Democrat who was one of the law's prime supporters.

The situation had reached a point in Louisiana, Senator Cravins said, that 
"we had half the population in prison and the other half watching them," 
while the state spent $600 million a year on corrections and was facing a 
budget deficit.

"We were pouring money into a bottomless pit, but we couldn't address the 
real causes of crime like the lack of early childhood education," he said, 
a particular problem in Louisiana, which has the lowest per capita income 
in the nation.

Not everyone has supported the revised laws. Some legislators have been 
accused of being "soft on crime" and prosecutors have complained that 
scrapping mandatory minimum sentences takes away one of their best tools to 
get street criminals to plea bargain and trade information about other 
criminals in exchange for lesser sentences.

Stephen Mallory, a former deputy director of the Mississippi Bureau of 
Narcotics who is now chairman of the department of criminal justice at the 
University of Southern Mississippi, opposed his state's new law restoring 
eligibility for parole for first-time nonviolent criminals.

"It's a joke," Professor Mallory said, because "anyone in law enforcement 
knows these are not first-time offenders. There is a strong likelihood that 
they've committed 30 or 40 crimes before and just finally got caught."

The change in the law will be costly for society, Professor Mallory said. 
"If you turn out someone who is a real career criminal, you will save 
$30,000 in prison costs, but he will do $100,000 worth of property and 
emotional damage in more crimes."

But State Representative Michael P. Lawlor, a Democrat who is chairman of 
the Connecticut House judiciary committee, says he sees another advantage 
to the new laws, including the one sponsored by Gov. John G. Rowland, a 
Republican, that ends a decade-old system of mandatory prison terms for 
nonviolent drug offenders. He said the changes would help reduce huge 
racial disparities in who goes to prison.

Nine out of 10 people in jail and prison in Connecticut for drug offenses 
are black or Hispanic, Mr. Lawlor said, but half of those arrested on drug 
charges are white. Part of the problem, he said, is a Connecticut law that 
established a mandatory sentence for selling or possessing drugs within 
two-thirds of a mile of a school, day care center or public housing project.

The result, Mr. Lawlor said, is that 90 percent of cities like Hartford or 
New Haven are within these areas, and so poor and minority people who live 
in these areas end up in prison for any drug charge.

"I think this is the most significant change in criminal justice policy we 
have made in more than 10 years," Mr. Lawlor said. "Two or three years from 
now you are going to be able to look back and see the new law has made a 
tremendous impact on who is in prison."

And there are more states where change may soon come. The sponsors of the 
California referendum that was approved by voters last November mandating 
drug treatment instead of incarceration for first- and second-time 
offenders convicted of drug possession, are pushing to get a similar 
initiative on the ballot in Florida, Ohio and Michigan for the 2002 election.
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