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Date: April 29, 2024 Mon
Time: 9:46 pm
Time: 9:46 pm
Results for prisons (ohio)
2 results foundAuthor: American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio Title: Reform Cannot Wait: A Comprehensive Examination of the Cost of Incarceration in Ohio from 1991-2010 Summary: Over the last twenty years, numerous experts have studied Ohio’s criminal justice system and made recommendations for reform. Unfortunately, many of those recommendations have been ignored. The result is that our criminal justice system is riddled with inefficient policies that increase cost, reduce safety, and contribute to racial disparities. Our criminal justice system is functioning well over capacity and over budget. • We are funneling a significant number of low-level, low-risk offenders into the most costly placements and away from alternatives that cost less and are more effective. • We waste resources on those who are least likely to pose some future risk to society, rather than focusing scarce resources on ensuring the most dangerous are adequately supervised. • We are sacrificing safety to continue funding costly, inefficient policies with failed results. • Communities of color around the state carry the burden of an unbalanced criminal justice system. • We fail to document how various programs function, rendering them impossible to audit for cost efficiency or success. What follows is a survey of the many studies that have analyzed Ohio’s criminal justice system, identified inefficiencies across program areas, and made recommendations to improve efficiency and fairness. For the last twenty years, these inefficiencies have been allowed to continue and grow. Recommendations were not acted upon, with officials often claiming that more study is needed and putting the problem off for another day. That day is here. In light of the current budget crisis, these inefficiencies can no longer be ignored. Details: Cleveland, OH: American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, 2011. 20p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed April 21, 2011 at: http://www.acluohio.org/issues/CriminalJustice/ReformCannotWait2010_08.pdf Year: 2011 Country: United States URL: http://www.acluohio.org/issues/CriminalJustice/ReformCannotWait2010_08.pdf Shelf Number: 121467 Keywords: Costs of Criminal JusticeCriminal Justice SystemsImprisonmentPrisons (Ohio) |
Author: Diroll, David J. Title: Prison Crowding: The Long View, With Suggestions Summary: Most of this report takes you through the recent history of Ohio’s prison population (see A Short Primer on Prison Crowding, beginning on p. 4). As Ohio faces record deficits and record prison populations, that primer should be worth 15 minutes of your time. The table on p. 6 is especially useful. Several informed suggestions designed to ease the problem begin on p. 14. Here are a few of the report’s highlights: • Ohio prisons now hold about 50,500. That’s 6½ times the number held in 1974. That puts the prison system 31% over its rated capacity, with about 12,500 more inmates than the prisons were built to hold (p. 4). • Crowding gives the state a perverse bargain. Extra inmates add relatively little to total costs. Adding inmates in an over-capacity system only costs about $16/day in food, clothing, and medical care. To save the $60+ “total” prison costs—including construction, debt service, and added staff—the population will have to move below capacity. Many different ideas will have to be considered (p. 4). • Ohio undertook an expensive prison construction project from the mid-‘80s to the mid-‘90s, adding over 17,000 beds. But the number of inmates and their sentence lengths continually grew to exceed the system’s expanded capacity (p. 7). • For years, the prison population increased as prison intake grew. However, recent growth in Ohio’s prison population—even with mandatory sentences and scores of bills that increase penalties for particular offenses—is not driven primarily by intake (although it is a factor). It’s largely fueled by increases in inmates’ average length-of-stay (pp. 4-14). • In the past 35 years, the only period in which the Ohio prison population remained relatively static was the first decade under S.B. 2, from 1997-2006. That bill increased the actual time served for high level offenders but made tradeoffs for others, including meaningful checks on length-of-stay (pp. 8-10). • A peculiar line of U.S. Supreme Court cases led the Ohio Supreme Court to strike down S.B. 2’s key length-of-stay restrictions in 2006. Even when accounting for other factors, these decisions led to an increase in average time served of almost 5 months per inmate. The cumulative “Blakely/Foster effect” so far has been well over 4,000 beds. None of this growth came from tough-on-crime legislation (p. 14). • Sentencing Commission suggestions include: o Reenact a constitutional alternative to Foster (pp. 15); o Seriously consider the changes proposed in S.B. 10 (p. 15-16); o Treat drug and non-drug cases alike within the same sentencing range (pp. 16-17); o A sampling of other ideas begins on p. 18. • Separately, simplify the Revised Code (p. 20) and address the “missing” elements in various criminal statutes (p. 20). Details: Columbus, OH: Ohio Criminal Sentencing Commission, 2011. 21p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed August 26, 2011 at: http://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/Boards/Sentencing/resources/Publications/MonitoringReport2011.pdf Year: 2011 Country: United States URL: http://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/Boards/Sentencing/resources/Publications/MonitoringReport2011.pdf Shelf Number: 122550 Keywords: Prison OvercrowdingPrisons (Ohio)Sentencing |