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| Progress on minimum sentences |
| By thetimes-tribune.com- Judge Jeffrey Spreacher |
| Published: 08/05/2015 |
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As a Pennsylvania trial court judge elected in 1991, I was shocked to learn that judicial discretion in sentencing was a thing of the past. Combined with sentencing guidelines that became law 10 years before my election, these tough-on-crime mandates created a state prison construction epidemic starting in 1984, when 16 new prisons were built and occupied in just the next 14 years. This nearly tripled the number of state prisons operating before the guidelines became law in 1982. Sadly, the number of prisoners serving a state sentence in the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections increased even more, a six-time increase in just 25 years. The average Department of Corrections prison population remained stable from 1940 to 1980 at 7,000 to 8,000 inmates. By 2008, the inmate population exceeded 50,000, where it has remained the past seven years. Even worse, the annual budget increased more than 20 times from $94 million in 1980 to more than $2 billion today, and the annual budget does not include the millions of dollars spent by taxpayers each time a new prison was built and furnished. As a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in 2013 in Alleyne v. U.S., dozens of trial court judges throughout Pennsylvania have ruled that mandatory minimum sentences are unconstitutional. Those cases are on appeal. Thus far, three have been affirmed by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which struck down the imposition of mandatory minimum sentencing in all three of these different fact scenarios. Read More. |
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