Editorial: Fix Early Release
Editorial
March 6, 2010
One of the big commercial winemakers for years had a successful advertising slogan: “We will sell no wine before its time.”
This year the Oregon Legislature is wishing it had applied that idea not to wine but to state prison inmates. The Legislature’s sensible effort to save a little money in a bad economy launched a program to release a number of prisoners before their expected time.
For a variety of reasons, the program didn’t turn out well. So even its leading proponents helped order a temporary halt during the special session in February.
Two things should be said about that:
First, Oregon is not alone. Roughly half the states have tried one or another type of early prisoner release to save money during the recession. And many have had difficulties similar to those experienced in Oregon.
Second, the program has been suspended, not killed. If the Legislature can fix the problems that cropped up during the first effort, it has every reason to try a revised, improved early release program.
The first point was confirmed in a front-page story in the March 4 New York Times. Wrote reporter Monica Davey: “In the rush to save money in grim budgetary times, states nationwide have trimmed their prison populations by expanding parole programs and early releases. But the result — more convicted felons on the streets, not behind bars — has unleashed a backlash, and state officials now find themselves trying to maneuver between saving money and maintaining the public’s sense of safety.”
She cites Oregon as an example and notes its temporary suspension of “a program they had expanded last year to let prisoners, for good behavior, shorten their sentences (and to save $6 million) …”
But she goes on to describe similar problems in Illinois, Colorado, California and Michigan. As in Oregon, the programs elsewhere met strong resistance from victims’ rights groups and prosecutors, both of which typically have strong influence in legislatures.
Oregon ran into particular trouble in failing to draw a hard line excluding perpetrators of violent, person-on-person crimes.
Oregon officials also found many prisoners trying to take advantage of the law by asking for reductions in sentences for nonviolent crimes related to but technically separate from their main offenses.
Many people did not understand the relatively modest sentence reductions effected for those who made it through the screening and won approval.
Successful applicants were eligible for a 30 percent reduction in their sentences instead of the 20 percent maximum that had been in effect before. The expansion added 10 percentage points at most. While that’s not huge, it’s certainly worth trying for from a prisoner’s standpoint. And in the aggregate the savings added up to a fair amount of state money, an estimated $6 million if fully implemented.
News stories at the end of the special session indicated that 3,000 applications were approved and 800 were rejected before the program was suspended.
In any case, legislators should not stop here in their effort to impose greater rationality on the system of justice.
This exercise has already given some who were involved a better sense of who needs to be in prison and who could be dealt with in more effective but less expensive ways. Many leaders in this field nationally feel there is no good excuse for this country’s exorbitant rate of incarceration compared with the rest of the developed world.
Reporter Davey touched on this: “The authorities in some places say their changes are driven less by money than by the need to fix systems that are not working, and that such efforts were under way, in some cases, before the recession.”
Michigan officials defend their actions “as intelligent policy for a state that found itself, in 2007, in the unwanted position of having the fifth largest prison system in the county, (ahead of) far more populous states.
“Meanwhile the state has vastly expanded its program for prisoners returning to the outside world, officials said, directing millions of dollars toward helping those on parole stay out of trouble. The rate of parole violations, too, has dropped, they say.”
