Task force lays out plan for prison population reduction
20th March 2017 · 0 Comments
By Della Hasselle
Contributing Writer
Louisiana has long been known as the world’s prison capital, incarcerating more of its people than anywhere else. Now, leaders of a task force aimed at criminal justice reform have announced they have a plan to change that.
Louisiana’s Justice Reinvestment Task Force, created to study the state’s criminal justice system, found that the state’s taxpayers are “not getting a good public safety return on investment” into annual corrections spending, officials said in a 76-page report released last Thursday.
Annual corrections spending reaches nearly two-thirds of a billion dollars, the report found, yet the “tough on crime approach” does little to ensure more public safety. Rather, task force leaders said, policies that result in locking up nonviolent criminals and extended sentences for offenders only contribute to the state’s bloated recidivism rates.
But with a new plan, officials say that through comprehensive reforms the state could see a 13 percent drop in prison population, and save $305 million over a decade in the process. Ultimately, the task force projects a reduction of 4,800 prison beds by the year 2027.
Gov. John Bel Edwards is among advocates for criminal justice reform who has touted the plans put forth by the task force. He had long pushed for prison reform, and in his campaign for governor had promised to reduce the prison population by nearly 5,500 inmates.
On last Thursday, Edwards doubled down on his mission, calling the state’s incarceration rates “a stain” on the state’s reputation, and a “drain” on its communities.
“It’s not a reflection of who we are and what we stand for,” Edwards said. “We now have a roadmap that will allow us to keep our streets safe while shrinking our bloated prisons.”
The task force, which was initially established in 2015, spent a year meeting and coming up with recommendations for statutory and budgetary changes that would affect sentencing and corrections practices.
The force had three specific goals, according to the report released on last Thursday. In addition to reducing the corrections population and associated spending, the task force also aimed to expand supervision and sentencing practices and reinvest savings to reduce recidivism and improve reentry outcomes.
To come up with the plan, an inter-branch, bipartisan panel of experts looked to other states, like Texas, Georgia and Alabama, all of which have adopted data-driven policy changes.
Task force participants included members of legislature as well as Public Defender James Dixon, of the Louisiana Public Defender Board, and Department of Corrections Secretary James LeBlanc.
In a joint letter to other members of the task force, Edwards and LeBlanc said that the timing was particularly ripe for criminal justice reform given “the current budget climate.” At the time that he wrote the letter, the state’s budget was $313 million in the red.
“We must be strategic about our public safety investments,” the officials wrote. “While no reform package that is developed from this work can fix every problem, we believe the consequences of doing nothing are too high.”
Ultimately, the plan will result in a 16 percent drop in community supervision population, and result in $154 million reinvested into research-based programs and services that support victims.
In the final blueprint, the task force cited sobering statistics. In 2015, the state had 776 people in prison for every 100,000 residents, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Nationally, the average rate is 458 prisoners for every 100,000.
And most of those inmates hadn’t even been accused of committing violent crimes. In 2015, 81 percent of the state’s prison population was made up of nonviolent offenders.
In looking to other states, members of the task force found that in 2014, Louisiana sent nearly three times as many nonviolent offenders to prison as Florida did, despite the fact that the two states had comparable crime rates.
Experts have said recidivism rates, too, are disturbingly high.
In 2014, the Crime and Policy Evaluation Research Group within Louisiana State University’s Department of Sociology examined recidivism rates among a specific group of offenders who had received a sentence of 30 years or more, had served at least 20 years of that sentence and were over the age of 45.
The LSU study found that overall, recidivism rates among those offenders were 11.2 percent for a three-year period and 19.8 percent for a five-year period. In other words, just over one-tenth of all offenders, regardless of the crime or crimes they were accused of, returned to prison within three years of release, while nearly one-fifth of them returned with five years.
As part of the changes, the task force recommends reducing sentencing for nonviolent offenders. Instead, the task force said, stakeholders should focus on alternatives to prison, including more probation programming for those convicted of more minor crimes.
The task force also recommended revising drug penalties to target higher-level offenses, streamlining parole release for those compliant with the rules and implementing a felony class system to reduce uncertainty in sentencing and release.
The plan also calls for clearing barriers to successful re-entry, mostly by easing financial loads for those who have entered the criminal justice system, and strengthening community supervision by reducing maximum probation terms.
Many of the recommendations are expected to be introduced into this legislative session. According to the task force, savings in 2018 alone would exceed $9 million, if the comprehensive plans were followed.
Acknowledging lengthy sentences and high recidivism rates, Senate President John Alario, Speaker of the House Taylor Barras, and Chief Justice Bernette Johnson stressed in a joint letter that it wasn’t “just budget pressures” that motivated them to pull for reform.
“We are committed to using data and scientific evidence to help identify ways to improve the functioning of Louisiana’s sentencing and corrections system,” they said.
Barras further added that since much of low-level drug and property crime is driven by addiction, the state can save millions and also have less crime by focusing prison beds on “those who pose a more serious public safety threat.”
He also advocated for making “smart investments” in probation and drug treatment for those accused of nonviolent crimes.
The task force has gotten an outpouring of praise and support from local and national criminal justice reformers.
Craig Deroch, who serves as senior vice president for advocacy and public policy at Prison Fellowship, the nation’s largest outreach to prisoners, praised members for “thinking outside the bars.”
“What we’re really trying to do here is not just become smarter but become smarter on crime but we’re trying to increase public safety,” Deroch said. “That’s the most respectful thing we can do for a victim. We don’t have a time machine — we can’t go back and undo a crime, but we can reduce the likelihood that a new crime would occur.”
The plan also received praise from the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights for its stance on allowing parole eligibility for those sentenced to juvenile life without parole.
“In recommending that the state no longer sentence children to die in prison, the Task Force has recognized that children are uniquely capable of positive change and should have an opportunity for redemption,” Aaron Clark-Rizzio, the executive director, said.
He did add, however, that he hopes the legislature will allow children to make their first case before a parole board after serving 20, rather than 30, years in prison.
Other skeptics have been wary of the comprehensive plan. Some point out that alternatives to incarceration, just like incarceration itself, costs money — something that could be hard to scrounge up in Louisiana, where news of repeated budget shortfalls have dominated news cycles.
Pete Adams, the executive director of Louisiana District Attorneys’ Association, also said that while Louisiana should be smarter about how it spends money on incarceration, and that he wanted to work with members of the task force, the state had to be careful about not being too lenient on offenders.
He said that already the state had done “pretty well” on taking measures to reduce the number of nonviolent offenders, and was concerned that the new proposals would also be soft on violent criminals. He said the new plan shouldn’t offer them lenient parole eligibility.
“Now we’re suddenly talking about going far beyond nonviolent offenders who are unnecessarily incarcerated,” Adams said. “We’re going to draw the line at violent crime. Going to have to oppose the proposed release of parole eligibility for violent offenders.”
“We have to make it so there are not bad unintended consequences,” he added.
District Attorney Ricky Babin agreed that the state should, to a degree, remain tough on crime.
“You tell me, when’s enough enough?” he asked, concerning leniency for things like property crimes. “What about a second offense? What about a third? What about someone who’s committed 27, 28 burglaries? Do we put those in prison? That’s nonviolent.”
This article originally published in the March 20, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
