Pubdate: Wed, 26 Mar 2014
Source: Philadelphia Daily News (PA)
Copyright: 2014 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.
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PAST ITS CELL-BY

It's Time for PA.'S Imprisonment Rate to Drop. Even Texas' Has

T HE United States leads the world in putting its people behind bars. 
Think of this fact as a massive ocean liner whose engines went into 
overdrive in the 1980s and 1990s with the war on drugs and mandatory 
minimum sentencing, exploding the prison rates.

Today, more than 2 million people are in U.S. prisons. A recent 
report by the Pew Charitable Trusts suggests that this speeding ocean 
liner may be slowing down, with many states actually working to turn 
the vessel around.

The good news is that 31 states have shown a decrease in imprisonment 
rates in the past five years. Texas is one of them. Pennsylvania 
isn't. In fact, Pennsylvania showed an increase in imprisonment rates 
of 10 percent from 2007 to 2012, second only to West Virginia, which 
saw an increase of 13 percent. Those are the dates that Pew was 
measuring; in the decade beginning in 2000, the state increased its 
prison population by a whopping 40 percent.

You know it's bad when Texas does anything better than we do.

The incarceration rate is not just a justice issue, but a budget 
problem. High imprisonment rates drive huge budgets. In 2009, it cost 
$35,000 a year to house an inmate in Pennsylvania, and the overall 
state corrections budget now exceeds $2 billion. That's an investment 
worth questioning, especially since research continues to point to 
the thin connection between incarceration and crime rates.

The Pew report points out that crime went down in 90 percent of the 
states that decreased prison populations; it actually went up in one 
of the 15 states that increased its prison population. Many of those 
incarcerated are nonviolent drug offenders, and polls show that 
people are in favor of alternatives to incarceration that do a better 
and less expensive job. Not incidental is the fact that minorities 
comprise 61 percent of the state's prison population.

It's good to know that there are enlightened states that see that 
reinvesting money spent on prisons benefits everyone. Why aren't we 
one of them?

Gov. Corbett pushed for the Justice Reinvestment prison-reform 
initiative in 2012, which has succeeded in other states. But the 
prison population, which Corbett claims has increased more slowly 
under his administration, actually rose in 2013.

But this is not just the governor's problem. When Secretary of 
Corrections John Wetzel recently testified in Harrisburg at a budget 
hearing, he pointed out that the Legislature keeps passing laws that 
have the potential to increase prison populations. Case in point: 
Earlier this year, Rep. Dan Moul, R-Adams/Franklin counties, 
sponsored legislation targeting "the knockout game," providing 
stiffer penalties, including the ability to charge juveniles as 
adults. This for a "crime" that is largely considered an urban legend.

Such laws are the easy, lazy way for legislators to signal that they 
are "tough on crime" and that they are "doing something."

We have to turn that mind-set around, so that locking fewer people up 
is actually seen as the tougher job - and one that drives better results.
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