COLUMBUS - Ohio's bulging prisons are just slightly less crowded thanks to a recent Ohio Supreme Court ruling, but the state's corrections director told lawmakers yesterday he doesn't expect that to last long.
The state's prisons are still housing 32 percent more inmates than they were designed to hold.
A sentencing-reform bill intended to at least partly address the issue remains stalled in the Ohio Senate.
"We can get smart on crime, not soft on crime,'' Ohio Rehabilitation and Corrections Director Terry Collins said. "We can still punish people without putting everybody behind a prison fence. In fact, we can do it better.''
He and Gov. Ted Strickland support a bill that cleared a Republican-controlled Senate committee by a single vote this year but has yet to reach the full chamber.
The bill is designed to ease future overcrowding by allowing nonviolent inmates entering the system to earn more time off their sentences by participating in prison education and treatment programs, using more alternative sentencing like electronic monitoring, and raising the dollar-value thresholds that turn a misdemeanor theft charge into a felony.Of the state's 31 prisons, 11 are operating over capacity by at least half. One, the Lorain Correctional Institution through which many inmates enter the system, is operating 157 percent over capacity.
"You can't put 10 pounds in a five-pound bag,'' said Sen. Bill Seitz (R., Cincinnati), the sentencing reform bill's sponsor. "We don't have the money to build new jails, and therefore we've got to do something. So let's do something smart.''
A recent Supreme Court ruling has forced the state to release 96 inmates returned to prison after violating postrelease conditions. The court found that the state could not enforce postrelease conditions if judges failed to put offenders on notice of the restrictions in their sentencing orders.
Those releases have contributed to a slight dip in prison population to 51,044 after hitting a record of 51,273 a year ago.
While some negotiations have led to concessions, county prosecutors remain opposed to the idea of letting inmates shave more time off their sentences. Senate Bill 22 would raise the current limit of one day for every month of program participation to five days per month.
"It blows a big hole in the truth-in-sentencing law,'' said John Murphy, executive director of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association. "The statute serves an important purpose of making sentences clearer and more reliable. A prisoner knows what his sentence is, and it bolsters public confidence in the integrity of the system. It sends a clear message to someone who is thinking about committing a crime that he's going to serve the time.''
Mr. Strickland originally proposed sentencing reform as a cost-saving measure in his budget proposal unveiled early this year. But resistance from prosecutors and lawmakers who don't want to be perceived as soft on crime have held the bill up.
The budget passed without the reforms as federal stimulus dollars temporarily eased the financial strain.
Contact Jim Provance at:
jprovance@theblade.com
or 614-221-0496.
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