Lexington Herald Leader: 'Tough On Crime' Drains State Funds.
'Tough on crime' drains state funds
A study conducted for a legislative committee and presented to the panel last week found that Kentucky's prison population increased by 42 percent from fiscal year 2000 to fiscal year 2009 — up from an average of 15,164 to 21,472.
State spending on prisons increased by more than 53 percent during the same period, going from $294 million to $451 million.
Eye-popping numbers?
Not so much if you take a longer view of Kentucky's prison history.
In 1970, Kentucky spent $7 million housing a prison population of 2,838. Get your calculator out and do the math comparing those totals with 2009 if you want to see eye-popping numbers.
What you'll find is a population increase of more than 650 percent and a cost increase of more than 6,300 percent. All during a time span when Kentucky's crime rate increased by about 3 percent.
But during that time span, too, Kentucky joined the nation in adopting a "get tough on crime" attitude. We expanded our definition of criminal activity, used aggravating factors to impose harsher sentences and enacted persist felony legislation, all at significant fiscal cost to the state.
But not always in the name of common sense.
For instance, we don't just lock up murderers, rapists, armed robbers and other violent criminals and throw away the keys under persistent felony laws. Those keys also get thrown away for non-violent offenders — people with multiple convictions for everything from stealing to feed a drug habit to writing bad checks.
That helps explain one other factoid from the Legislative Research Commission report presented to the Program Review and Investigations Committee. On any given day, inmates charged with these kinds of non-violent offenses make up about 46 percent of this state's prison population.
Kentucky cannot sustain the explosive growth in prison costs it has experienced over the last few decades without doing serious damage to other essential state services.
"Kentucky is spending more to address the cost of failing to invest in education than it is on students," Dave Adkisson, president of the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, told a legislative committee this summer.
We must reverse that trend.
Earlier this year, the General Assembly made a start down that path by passing Senate Bill 4, which expanded diversion programs for non-violent drug offenders. Its sponsor, former Sen. Dan Kelly, estimated it could save the state $100 million and reduce the prison population 20 percent over the next five years.
The next step lawmakers take down the path to reducing prison costs should be limiting the application of our persistent felony offender law to those criminals who pose the most threat to society, the ones with violent crimes on their record.
A study conducted for a legislative committee and presented to the panel last week found that Kentucky's prison population increased by 42 percent from fiscal year 2000 to fiscal year 2009 — up from an average of 15,164 to 21,472.
State spending on prisons increased by more than 53 percent during the same period, going from $294 million to $451 million.
Eye-popping numbers?
Not so much if you take a longer view of Kentucky's prison history.
In 1970, Kentucky spent $7 million housing a prison population of 2,838. Get your calculator out and do the math comparing those totals with 2009 if you want to see eye-popping numbers.
What you'll find is a population increase of more than 650 percent and a cost increase of more than 6,300 percent. All during a time span when Kentucky's crime rate increased by about 3 percent.
But during that time span, too, Kentucky joined the nation in adopting a "get tough on crime" attitude. We expanded our definition of criminal activity, used aggravating factors to impose harsher sentences and enacted persist felony legislation, all at significant fiscal cost to the state.
But not always in the name of common sense.
For instance, we don't just lock up murderers, rapists, armed robbers and other violent criminals and throw away the keys under persistent felony laws. Those keys also get thrown away for non-violent offenders — people with multiple convictions for everything from stealing to feed a drug habit to writing bad checks.
That helps explain one other factoid from the Legislative Research Commission report presented to the Program Review and Investigations Committee. On any given day, inmates charged with these kinds of non-violent offenses make up about 46 percent of this state's prison population.
Kentucky cannot sustain the explosive growth in prison costs it has experienced over the last few decades without doing serious damage to other essential state services.
"Kentucky is spending more to address the cost of failing to invest in education than it is on students," Dave Adkisson, president of the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, told a legislative committee this summer.
We must reverse that trend.
Earlier this year, the General Assembly made a start down that path by passing Senate Bill 4, which expanded diversion programs for non-violent drug offenders. Its sponsor, former Sen. Dan Kelly, estimated it could save the state $100 million and reduce the prison population 20 percent over the next five years.
The next step lawmakers take down the path to reducing prison costs should be limiting the application of our persistent felony offender law to those criminals who pose the most threat to society, the ones with violent crimes on their record.
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posted by KYJurisDoctor at 8:01 AM
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