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| Bipartisan coalition fights for prison reform in Pennsylvania |
| By pennlive.com - DONALD GILLILAND |
| Published: 05/15/2012 |
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Fix the inefficiencies in the Department of Corrections that keep prisoners behind bars for months after they’ve been paroled and that cost taxpayers millions every year. Fix the state’s Community Corrections Centers that have been shown to make the inmates who go through them more likely to commit another crime. Start evaluating criminals’ risk of reoffending before the judge passes sentence to make sure the right punishments are applied to the right people. Support problem-solving courts such as drug court, mental health court and veterans’ courts that have been proven to reduce crime without sending people to prison. And do it all soon. Those are some of the recommendations to fix Pennsylvania’s prison crisis offered Monday morning by former Gov. George Leader and a bipartisan coalition led by the Commonwealth Foundation. They are calling for “real corrections reform, right now.” The state prison system costs taxpayers nearly $2 billion a year, with less than stellar results. And nearly every year we send more people into it. There were 7,000 inmates in state prison when Leader was governor in the late 1950s. Now there are more than 50,000. That increase can be attributed neither to a corresponding increase in crime nor to population growth. It can be attributed generally to a “get tough on crime” legislative culture since the 1980s that passed — in piecemeal fashion — increasingly harsh sentences for increasingly minor crimes, particularly those related to addiction to alcohol and drugs. There is now a “get smart on crime” movement afoot aimed at the growing population of nonviolent addicted offenders. “You can’t call what we have today criminal justice policy because ‘policy’ assumes a conscious decision has been made, and we haven’t,” Secretary of Corrections John Wetzel said. Wetzel was onstage Monday as the bipartisan group offered its recommendations. Read More. |
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