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Proposed solutions to prison crowding problem would undo old laws

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By Tom Beyerlein, Staff Writer Updated 10:06 AM Thursday, June 10, 2010

Tough-on-crime laws have left prisons bursting at the seams, causing state officials and lawmakers to rethink the way justice is meted out in Ohio. Some reform proposals would undo laws that caused prison rolls to explode since the 1980s.

Ohio’s 31 prisons are at 132 percent of their designed capacity with roughly 51,000 inmates. If sentencing provisions don’t change, officials estimate the state will house almost 54,000 inmates by 2018.

“It goes back to something your mom told you when you were a kid: ‘You can’t put 10 pounds in a five-pound bag,’ ” said state Sen. Bill Seitz, R-Cincinnati. “Something’s got to give.”

The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction supports a bill sponsored by Seitz, which would increase thresholds for tougher penalties for certain nonviolent crimes, eliminate differences in penalties for crack and powdered cocaine, revise penalties for marijuana trafficking and possession of marijuana, hashish and cocaine, allow earned days of credit toward early release for inmate participation in education and job-training programs and expand nonprison sentencing alternatives. The bill hasn’t been scheduled for a floor vote.

Seitz also is co-chairing a bipartisan effort through the Council of State Governments to develop ways to cut the corrections budget and reinvest in what the council calls “strategies to increase public safety.” The Ohio work group is to issue recommendations in late summer or early fall.

Ohio’s inmate population exploded in the 1980s and ’90s, triggering a prison-construction boom and escalating annual corrections budgets. Among numerous laws that put more people in prison for longer periods was a truth-in-sentencing law that all but eliminated parole and “good time” for felons convicted since 1996.

“We, the legislature, bear responsibility for this” increased incarceration, Seitz said. “Everybody’s got to be a hero. Too many of my colleagues were oblivious to the warnings of the Department of Rehabilitation and the Legislative Services Commission that said, ‘you can do this, but you’re going to have to pay for it.’ ”

State prisons chief Ernie Moore said the prisons have too many low-level felons, particularly drug offenders who “haven’t acted out violently against anybody else.”

“Prison is designed for violent and predatory people, folks who are wreaking havoc on our communities,” Moore said. “The prison doesn’t have to be the only punishment for offenders.”

Nationwide, nonviolent offenders make up more than 60 percent of the jail and prison population, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington, D.C., think tank. The center recommends cutting that number by half, which would bring the incarceration rate to 1993 levels.

A Montgomery County task force has been working on finding local alternatives to incarceration, and ways to prevent ex-convicts from re-offending and returning to prison. And Montgomery County Common Pleas Court officials have long worked to use alternative programs to reduce the jail and prison population, said Deputy Court Administrator Jim Dare.

He said use of probation already has nearly quadrupled since 1980, to 4.2 Americans in 2008. In that period, the U.S. population has increased by 33 percent, while the prison and jail population increased by 350 percent. The county jail has been under its capacity of 900 for about two years.

Dare said any additional increase in probation needs to be coupled with funding for more probation officers.

“You can put a whole bunch of people on probation,” he said, “but if you don’t have the (staff) to manage them, it’s like having no supervision at all.”

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2264