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Date: November 22, 2024 Fri
Time: 12:19 pm
Time: 12:19 pm
Results for costs of criminal justice (oregon)
1 results foundAuthor: Oregon. Reset Subcommittee on Public Safety Title: Report of the Reset Subcommittee on Public Safety Summary: The key objective of the Reset Cabinet is to “develop a plan containing specific recommendations to the Governor to reset State government’s core functions and stabilize its revenue structure.” We have developed options at a time when, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting indexes, Oregon’s person and property crimes are at historic lows, prison capacity has grown to its highest level, and the cost of operating the prison system has increased dramatically over the last fifteen years. The Public Safety subcommittee has addressed the expected $2.5 billion shortfall in the 2011‐13 biennial state budget by focusing primarily on the most expensive element of the state’s public safety system – prisons. During the next decade, when the shortfall between revenue and expenses is expected to remain at more than $2 billion if nothing is done, the April 2010 Department of Corrections prison forecast predicts 2,000 additional prison beds will be necessary to carry out our current sentencing policies – pushing the prison population to 16,000 by 2020. There are three main cost drivers in building and operating prisons. Our efforts focused on two: who is entering the prison system and how long they stay. (The third cost driver – the pay and benefits of public safety workers – will be addressed in the main Reset Cabinet report.) The subcommittee options will impact those two cost drivers by looking with a cost/benefit eye at what gives taxpayers the greatest return on their public safety investment and continues to protect communities and reduce future crime victimization. Because the budget savings from some of the options presented will take several years to realize, we provide both short‐term and long‐term steps to optimize the use of our most expensive public safety resource, state prison beds. These options require weighing difficult trade offs in how to reduce budgets and must be driven by evidence based practices and the experience of other states. None of these options are easily achieved, but we believe these options represent a viable opportunity for the State to emerge from its financial crisis with a well balanced and efficient system that prioritizes the public’s safety. In concert with other options, these reductions will provide some budgetary protection for key programs in education and health and human services systems – including mental health and alcohol and drug treatment that directly impact crime and incarceration rates. These systems are essential areas of investment to break cycles of criminality and reduce crime long term. Both the Reset Cabinet and the Subcommittee were asked to put traditional thinking and structures aside and develop options that could be used as new, more economical models of service delivery. This request proved to be a challenge. But the Subcommittee has identified options that meet this test and bear further consideration. These options include modifications in the relationship between the state and counties and the current cost structures for public safety funding. The Subcommittee looked for options that would provide models for incentives to form new partnerships with counties to encourage district attorneys to adopt uniform charging and sentencing practices. Also, the subcommittee suggests that counties use local cost effective, accountability measures to deal with short term, non‐violent offenders who will be shortly returning to their communities. These policies, if implemented, would make more effective use of the expensive prison bed resource. Given the expected loss of federal timber revenue in several counties, these partnerships are critical to maintaining an acceptable level of county services. The subcommittee during the course of its work produced a survey instrument to gauge the reaction of various stakeholders to the acceptance of the problem statement set forth by the Governor in the executive order, and to determine whether there were potential solutions or options around which public safety stakeholders could coalesce. A brief summary of the survey results are provided later in this report and the full results are available at http://cjinstitute.org/projects/oregonreset. In addition, the subcommittee spent time discussing both the challenges and options for solutions with many stakeholder and partner groups including sheriffs, chiefs of police, district attorneys, victims advocates from the Attorney General’s office, community corrections leaders, leadership from the Oregon Youth Authority, Board of Parole and Post‐Prison Supervision, the Judicial Department and others. Because sentencing policy, not crime rates, drives the use of expensive prison beds, the subcommittee believes a restructuring of sentencing policy to a modern, uniform sentencing guideline system based upon truth in sentencing will provide fair, transparent allocation of prison time to those offenders posing the greatest long term threat to our communities. These guidelines must: Take advantage of the more than 9,000 prison beds that have been added to system since the old guideline system was created in 1989 Keep faith with the spirit of the statutory sentencing changes that have been implemented by the Legislature and citizens since those guidelines were created Acknowledge the scarcity of resources in this environment, an issue that is too often ignored when sentencing policies are established. Finally, at the recommendation of many in the public safety community, the subcommittee has proposed that the State adopt federal earned‐time guidelines including 15 percent earned time for all offenders that are not incarcerated for life, and greater use of transitional resources such as halfway houses and electronic monitoring at the end of their sentences. Many of the options presented in this report, if implemented, would take more than a single biennium to achieve their desired result. In some cases it may be five or more years before the financial impacts of these policy choices will be reflected in the State budget. Yet the material addressed later in this report demonstrates that the cumulative effect of these changes, if enacted and adhered to over time, can result in potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in avoided costs and system savings. The short‐term budget challenge is, however, more daunting. While politically difficult to address, the Subcommittee believes the biggest short‐term savings would come from a further legislative delay in the implementation of sentence enhancements contained in Ballot Measure 57, dealing with repeat property offenders. Property crime rates are at historic lows in Oregon, and a decision to delay the measure’s implementation would result in estimated savings of almost $40 million in the 2011‐2013 biennium alone. Virtually all of these options would require legislative action. The key sentencing guidelines measure, however, will require a bi‐partisan legislative effort with a 2/3 approval or a citizen referral and vote in May, 2011. The incoming Governor and Legislature must understand the gravity of the State’s financial situation and seriously consider their role in crafting a long term stable public safety system against the backdrop of our current and projected financial picture. The alternatives are much worse. If Oregonians fail to plan for our public safety system’s future with an honest assessment of the financial situation, the State will not avoid the problem. The State will still have to deal with less money, but rather than using long term, careful planning to assure our ability to carry out the sentences that are imposed, the State will be forced to consider the early release of offenders who have already been sentenced and will risk the same overcrowding of inmates that brought federal litigation in Oregon in the 1980’s. Rather than the temporary policy that bridges the State to sustainable corrections practices, these early releases and prison overcrowding will become the norm. In addition, the State risks disproportionate reductions in certain segments of the public safety system that create dangerous imbalances in the system as a whole. Cuts, for example to courts and indigent defense, have the effect of shutting down the criminal justice system. These actions erode the principle of “swift and certain” sanctions and destroy accountability as certain crimes are essentially ignored. Likewise, limiting resources for law enforcement, prosecutors, and community corrections can create an unbalanced system. In short, if we fail to plan for a changed economic future, we plan to fail as a public safety system. Details: Salem, OR: State of Oregon, 2010. 64p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed November 19, 2011 at: http://cjinstitute.org/files/OR_pubsafe_subcomreport_final.pdf Year: 2010 Country: United States URL: http://cjinstitute.org/files/OR_pubsafe_subcomreport_final.pdf Shelf Number: 123372 Keywords: Budgets for Criminal JusticeCosts of Criminal Justice (Oregon)Criminal Justice Expenditures |