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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > February > 06
Friday, February 6, 2009
Editorial: ‘Truth-in-sentencing’ shouldn’t be fad
If Gov. Ted Strickland weren’t taking a special interest in prisons, that would be odd. He was for a while a prison psychologist.
One benefit of that personal experience is that he understands that prisons are hugely expensive enterprises. And no one needs to tell him that Ohio is not exactly rolling in money these days.
Purely and simply, saving money is behind the governor’s suggestion — in his proposed budget — to allow prisoners to earn early release for behaving.
Inmates would have to do more than stay out of fights; they’d also have to participate in educational or vocational or treatment programs (which, incidentally, there’s often a waiting list for). In return, they could earn up to seven days of credit each month.
If the idea is approved, Ohio will be resurrecting an old policy. The state did away with most “good time” credit when its “truth-in-sentencing” law took effect in July, 1996. The law was changed partly because criminals weren’t serving the sentences victims and the public thought were being imposed. “Good time” routinely cut a prisoner’s actual time behind bars by a third.
That practice existed not just to give prisoners an incentive to stay in line. Prisons then, as they still are today, were bulging.
When the law took effect, the Columbus Dispatch wrote:
“Both supporters and critics agree that the bill was driven by the state’s prison capacity, not a desire to get tough on crime. The new sentencing guidelines, while more definite, seek to channel only the most serious and violent felons into state institutions.
“Most people convicted of fourth- and fifth-degree felonies will be diverted into community-based correction programs, which include probation, community service, electronic monitoring, drug treatment, restitution and short sentences in county jails. The new sentence guidelines are supposed to reduce the prison growth rate from 10 percent to 5 percent annually, cutting the cost of constructing new penitentiaries.”
So much for those ambitions.
Many of the problems that the 1996 law was supposed to address are still with us. But even as there are still too few halfway houses, treatment programs and so on, if a judge does sentence someone to 10 years, the offender really will come close to being behind bars for a decade.
As smart and cost-effective as it would be to address — again — the lack of alternatives to prison, the governor needs to think long and hard about backing so much “earned time.” Instead, he could just say that some crimes carry sentences that are too stiff (if that’s what he believes).
Or he could keep working on resolving where to put offenders who aren’t dangerous and who are going to serve less than a year in prison anyway. An estimated 57 percent of inmates will be locked up for that short amount of time, even without getting “earned” credit.
Over and over proponents of Ohio’s truth-in-sentencing law said the justice system needed to be honest about what a sentence really amounted to. They said nothing less than the system’s credibility was at stake when a judge’s pronouncements didn’t match up with reality — and they were right.
Allowing for “good time” isn’t ridiculous. One goal of rehabilitation ought to be gaining an understanding of consequences — both bad and good.
At the same time, it’s also important that when judges, of all people, look defendants and victims in the eye, they are speaking the truth.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Ellen Belcher, Law Enforcement, State politics
Let’s look at the politcs of Strickland’s education plan
Over at the DDN Education blog, Get on the Bus, it took me two posts to analyze all the elements of Gov. Ted Strickland’s big education proposal from the state of the state address. (See part one here and part two here.)
But lets get away from the merits of the ideas in terms of policy and consider a different question — is Strickland’s plan smart politics?
Presuming the majority of the plan makes it through the legislature and is approved, let’s look ahead to what might happen politically over the next few years. Strickland must run for re-election in 2010. By using the one-time federal stimulus money to launch a big education reform, he’s betting that people will like what they see from the plan over the next two years.
And if things go right, they should at least notice a difference. Strickland’s plan is supposed to mean more funding burden for schools on the state, which is then supposed to result in fewer local school levies. And parents should start seeing all sorts of extras in schools as part of the plan — full-day kindergarten, smaller class sizes, even more school nurses.
So this gives Strickland the opportunity to run for re-election in 2010 arguing he’s the only governor in recent history to noticeably improve education and school funding in Ohio. If people buy that it should help his re-election chances. And the next budget crisis should hold off until early 2011 — possibly after he is re-elected in 2010. In 2011, however, there will be no federal stimulus funds to rescue the next two-year budget and it doesn’t seem like much time for a big economic recovery.
So then what happens? A newly-re-elected Strickland starts his next four year term with another big budget crisis in all likelihood. But he doesn’t have to run for re-election ever again. This seems like a time when he could potentially utter the dreaded “T” word — taxes. Strickland could use his political capital to propose a bargain to voters. “Like what’s happening in your school? The only way to keep it is if we raise taxes,” he could say. Otherwise, he’d tell people to prepare to see all his education changes dismantled.
Voters might not react well to this even a tax is approved. Would it kill Democrats’ chances in 2012 and 2014 if he pushed through a tax in early 2011? Maybe not. There would be two years before the 2012 election. Keep in mind that is three years from now. The Democrats could be greatly helped if the economy has started a turnaround. By the next governor’s race in 2014 — five years off from the worst of the economic crisis we expect to see this year in 2009 — if there has been enough economic recovery, the Democrats might be able to argue they fixed education while at the same time claiming credit for an improved economic climate.
But all this assumes a lot of things go Strickland and the Democrats’ way over the next several years. A lot could go wrong. The education plan could be viewed as a boondoggle. The statehouse could go all Republican in 2010. A Republican could win the governor’s race in 2012. The economy could get continuously worse over the next five years, hurting the party in power.
So you can see Strickland is making a few big bets. He is betting people will like the education plan and that the economy will recover. But if they do and if it does, there could be a lot of political gain.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Education, Scott Elliott, State politics
Martin Gottlieb: Strickland determined to remain an activist
Ted Strickland is happy that he was the governor identified in the news media as pushing President Barack Obama first and hardest to bail out state governments through his stimulus package.
In a meeting Tuesday with editors and writers at this newspaper, the governor raised that subject himself. He was making a point of how tough times are for state governments, no matter how frugal they have been.
(He reiterated that in 2007 he submitted the lowest-growth budget the state had seen in a very long time. Since then, of course, he has only cut and cut from that budget, as the economy has worsened. He’s now submitting his second two-year budget.)
Strickland said that when he first spoke up to the president, his fellow governors didn’t join in, even though some told him privately that he was right. But eventually a bunch did make the same pitch to the administration. He listed several, all Democrats.
It’s not hard to see why Strickland was the first. He had a special problem. It was not simply that the Heartland has been hit especially long and hard by economic problems. It was also that he has long been publicly committed to unveiling his plan this year for overhauling the state’s approach to K-12 education and its funding. He knew it was going to be expensive.
It would entail the state taking over more of the burden for funding (thus reducing reliance on the local property tax). Besides that, he would have to do something to actually improve education.
What he has in mind is not the sort of proposal you normally see coming from governors in such difficult times. A lot of other governors (not all) are retrenching, with goals along the lines of stopping the bleeding. In California (an extreme case), the governor kept his state of the state speech to 11 minutes, saying there was not much to talk about until the state dealt with its monster deficit.
In New York, the word the governor used to describe his state’s circumstances was “perilous.” Strickland’s signature word was “steadfast.”
Where big proposals are being made by governors, they are, in some cases, like what’s being talked about in Washington: infrastructure projects to provide jobs.
Strickland’s determination not to be deterred from pre-recession goals has him talking about the expensive likes of all-day kindergarten, an expanded school year and school day, and flat tuition, not to mention providing health care for more children.
When former Congressman John Kasich, a Republican, first started talking about running against Strickland in 2010, he called the incumbent a “caretaker” governor. People who follow state government knew it was baloney.
Strickland had a property tax cut to his credit, plus an enacted stimulus plan and an overhaul of the state’s system for running higher education. Republicans who worked with him on those are proud of their own output.
But a candidate running against Strickland might reasonably hope that the public doesn’t see him as a dynamo. He’s done so much in a bipartisan way — minimizing conflict — that the headlines have been relatively few. And he’s a low-key guy.
Now, halfway through his term, he’s staking a particularly striking claim to the activist label, outdoing most of his peers in determination to push ahead. There are abundant excuses for inaction. He’s ignoring them.
Muhammad Ali used to say that the reason he predicted the round in which he would knock out his opponent was to put pressure on himself, to subject himself to a special degree of embarrassment if he failed to at least come close to the goal.
Strickland put himself under pressure by saying that he would come up with a genuine restructuring for elementary and high school education. He did that long before he had much of a clue about what he would propose. Now he has to perform. The pressure is on him. Obama felt some of it.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Martin Gottlieb, State politics
