Georgia

In 2010, Georgia was the ninth-most populous state in the nation, and had the fourth highest incarceration rate.Footnote ⁵ Georgia incarcerated every seventieth adult of its 9.7 million residents, and there was no inclination that its pace would slow down in the coming years.Footnote ⁶ After Georgia’s adult prison population and spending on corrections more than doubled in twenty years, the outlook was bleak on any potential decline. Georgia faced decreasing revenues, a continuously expansive budget, increasing probation population, and a lack provision for services such as mental health.

At the time, the estimate was that there would be an 8 percent increase over the next five years in incarcerated persons – an additional 4,480 Georgians.Footnote ⁷ Georgia being a “tough on crime” state resulted in the recidivism rate of former inmates hovering around 30 percent, a rate with no notable change over the past decade.Footnote ⁸ Crime rates were not decreasing despite a continuous year-over-year rise in the number of convictions and the total number of individuals incarcerated. The public safety mission laid out by the Georgia Department of Corrections was stagnant with a vast probation network, nearly triple the size of the prison population. Over 2.6 million have a criminal record on file in Georgia, meaning that close to one quarter of the state’s population could be discriminated against by employers who use the public record to deny employment.Footnote ⁹

This discrimination only made the problem worse, and as a response the legislature proposed some reforms. The Georgia General Assembly passed HB 265 to create the “Special Council on Criminal Justice Reform for Georgians” with three mandates in mind: Address the size, scope, cost, and effectiveness of Georgia’s correctional system; reinvest savings from the Department of Corrections into strategies to decrease recidivism and crime; and strengthen community-based supervision. The first-year results of the Special Council brought about HB 1176, policies for reforming both sentencing reforming as well as correctional facilities and practices, which passed in May 2012. That bill was quickly followed by HB 242, an initiative to rewrite the juvenile justice system’s penal code. One year later, the General Assembly voted to extend the Special Council’s timeframe for five years, to increase the amount of investment in policy recommendations to achieve the three original mandates.Footnote ¹⁰

The results were apparent after only a few years: from 2012 to 2015, rather than follow the predicted trend toward an 8 percent increase, Georgia’s prison population dropped by 5.6 percent.Footnote ¹¹ More importantly, the number of annual commitments to prison in Georgia were the lowest since 2002. Reforms in the sentencing methods used by Georgia’s courts resulted in 18,139 commitments in 2015, down from 21,655 in 2009.Footnote ¹² As of 2016, Georgia’s 60 total prisons employ some 10,500 employees.Footnote ¹³ In 2010, Georgia’s Department of Corrections employed a total of 13,000.Footnote ¹⁴ The decrease over six years coincides with the increasingly lower total adult prison population, noted previously. As less nonviolent convicts are incarcerated, both the recidivism rate and the crime rate are decreasing. All of these decreases are helping the state overcome the problems created in the last few decades, and these reforms are just the beginning.

Recidivism was and continues to be a main focus of Georgia’s Special Committee. One of the major tenets of Georgia’s penal code was the “second chance law,” or the 1968 First Offender Act, which was created to help first-time offenders keep their record clean after serving their sentence. If utilized, the Act made it possible for those first-time offenders to expunge the conviction and public record after completing their sentence. Yet the Act became a bygone opportunity for defendants. The Special Council worked to restore awareness of the First Offender Act through HB 310, which informed all eligible Georgians of the opportunity to earn a clean slate. A second state-wide effort from the Special Council was the expanded usage of accountability courts to provide a method of sentencing nonviolent offenders. The result was a greater proportion of inmates in state prison serving violent or sexual sentences, representing an increase from 58 percent of the total prison population in 2009 to 67 percent in 2016.Footnote ¹⁵

Corruption, however, plagues the Georgia Department of Corrections. In February 2016, the Department of Justice indicted 49 current and former Georgia Department of Corrections officers for seven federal incidents of accepting bribes and smuggling contraband in exchange for drug deal protection.Footnote ¹⁶ A federal undercover investigation, led by Atlanta’s Federal Bureau of Investigation Field Office, uncovered corruption activities within eleven of Georgia’s thirty-five Department of Corrections facilities.Footnote ¹⁷ The indictments represent one of the continuing frustrations to reform: the myriad issues that come with the bloated bureaucracy of mass incarceration in the status quo, both in Georgia and in many states across America.

Flawed systems are not devoid of possibility for reform. One of the most meaningful reforms presented by Georgia’s Special Council came about in January 2014. With HB 242, Georgia’s juvenile courts began the new year with a new mandate: strengthening family relationships to boost juvenile safety and long-term security.Footnote ¹⁸ As a result, the number of youth in Georgia’s secure confinement reduced by 17 percent from 2013 to 2016.Footnote ¹⁹ And, similar to the decreasing number of adult commitments in Georgia’s correctional system, juvenile commitments decreased 33 percent in the same three-year period.Footnote ²⁰ By refocusing its juvenile system to prioritize the family and community in the development of juveniles character, rather than continuing its policy of putting them behind bars at detention centers, the Special Counsel found a rapid decrease in recidivism and the need for juvenile detention facilities.

Georgia’s work is far from over. The most recent February 2016 report from Georgia’s Special Counsel stated a breathtaking number of recommendations on more than a dozen topics. The entire criminal justice process is being placed under careful analytical scrutiny from the time a person is charged: the penal code, the accountability courts, the correctional facilities, the reentrance communities, and the processes of support and monitoring after release. By not ignoring the failures of the past twenty years and more, Georgia is already leading the nation in criminal justice reform. The last report from the Special Counsel understood the need for states to implement their own innovation: “It is often said that the states are our laboratories of democracy. With criminal justice reform, this is undeniably true.”Footnote ²¹

Alabama

Alabama’s incarceration population is not that the system is just over its capacity; it is holding nearly twice as many inmates as intended. In 2014, Alabama’s state prisons operated at over 195 percent capacity, some of the most crowded in the nation.Footnote ²² The state’s current, crippling situation is the outcome of a soaring prison population due to changes in criminal statutes, beginning in 1977. The 1990s saw Alabama’s tough on crime mindset reach new heights with the reintroduction of chain gangs. In 2016, four decades later, Alabama’s prison population had risen 840 percent.Footnote ²³

Governor Robert Bentley in 2014 stated that “82 percent of the offenders with the highest risk of reoffending, including property and drug offenders, reached the end of their sentence while in DOC custody, with no supervision to guide re-entry.”Footnote ²⁴ As a result, Governor Bentley signed into law legislation SB 67 in May 2015, with the intended goal of reducing the state prison population by 4,200 inmates within five years.Footnote ²⁵ SB 67 came about through the work by the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI), which Governor Bentley formed in June 2014 to study the horrific status quo environment of prisons fraught with investigations into sexual assault, homicide, and the smuggling of prohibited items. The JRI’s Prison Reform Task Force produced multiple reports, which led to the creation and goals of SB 67.

In March 2015, the JRI published its exhaustive “Analysis and Policy Framework” report, which began with the statement that “Alabama’s correctional system is in crisis.”Footnote ²⁶ Alabama’s status quo will mean the state must “spend hundreds of millions of dollars to increase capacity.”Footnote ²⁷ Yet that would still leave the underlying system, and growth of inmates, in place. The report recommends the state adopts policies “to avert significant costs and reduce recidivism.”Footnote ²⁸ Aside from sentencing reform and probation caseload redistribution, the report recommends the further establishment of Community Corrections Programs (CCPs).

These CCPs work as an option that is more intensive than a normal probation program especially for those who fall within Alabama’s least serious Class C offense class. Going beyond the supervision aspect of probation (in a similar manner to Illinois’ Adult Transition Centers [ATCs]), the CCPs provide educational, vocational, cognitive behavioral, and substance abuse treatment services. They are operated and maintained by counties, not the state, however not every Alabama county has a CCP or access to another county’s program. This method of sentencing can be both an alternative to prison as well as a part of a split sentence. The JRI recommended expanding the program in both the amount of locations and the scope of their usage as an alternative to prison. As of 2014, thirty-five CCPs serve forty-five counties in Alabama – twenty-two counties either have no facilities of their own or no options available to use an adjacent county’s CCP program.Footnote ²⁹

Two fundamental missing elements of the CCPs also place a limit on their current effectiveness. First, there are no state requirements that the programs must measure the result of their programs, such as how well the program adheres to evidence-based rehabilitation practices or antirecidivism education or release methods. Second, the programs must have no mechanism of accountability for how CCP funding is appropriated to deliver treatment or bolster services for those within its programming.

Beyond CCPs is the failing probation and parole supervision branch of the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC). In 2013 more than 40 percent of those admitted to state prison were for violation of conditions of probation or parole, but the more revealing statistic is the 47 percent rise in the number of people on felony probation revoked to prison between 2009 and 2013.Footnote ³⁰ The bill, SB 67, places a specific emphasis on reforming parole and parole supervisors to divert more people from going to prison and others from going back. The average parole officer in Alabama supervises a caseload of 200 parolees, a daunting if not unimaginable task.Footnote ³¹ Even with the minimal contact and care that parole officers could provide with equal attention paid to all cases, it is unrealistic to believe that the ADOC’s parole system can provide an effective method of transitioning felons back into their community.

The framework of JRI’s research found that the most significant reductions in the recidivism rates came from concentrating the resources on the highest risk individuals. What may sound obvious is far from the practice in Alabama. In the ADOC there is no increase of concentration based on risk; all offenders receive the same level of attention. This is highly counterproductive, as it often increases the recidivism rates of low-risk individuals as well as has little to no effect upon high-risk individuals.

The Prison Reform Task Force is focused on more than the incarceration side of Alabama’s crisis. Sentencing reform is also a major priority, as SB 67 creates “a new class of the least serious nonviolent felony offenses” and updates “felony thresholds for certain property and drug offenses.”Footnote ³² The new category, Class D, would be for lower-level property and drug offenses with a sentencing range of over one year to five years.

The addition of Class D would be most useful in the classification of burglary. Currently, all categories of burglary in Alabama are classified as violent crimes in three degrees of seriousness. Currently, 10 percent of annual prison admissions are for the lowest level of burglary, third-degree, “wherein no person is encountered while the crime is being committed.”Footnote ³³ Third-degree burglary is also the most common property offense of Alabama inmates and ranks second among all types of offenses by inmates.

Beyond the failure of Alabama’s standards for lower-level sentencing is the way inmates within that category are treated and released. Most importantly, 69 percent of inmates released without supervision are property and drug offenders, therefore falling within that class of lower level sentencing.Footnote ³⁴ Yet those who spend time in state prisons (rather than county jails, CCPs, or in parole programs) for lower-level sentences have some of the highest recidivism rates. While Alabama does not have state specific data for its lower level sentencing recidivism rates, the Prison Reform Task Force found the recidivism rate for state inmates across the nation was 81 percent for property offenses and 76 percent for drug offenses.Footnote ³⁵ The tough on crime practice of “straight sentencing” tends to have a heightened probability of those inmates committing a second crime within three years of release.

Alabama is facing hundreds of millions of dollars in added costs across the next six years. The reforms of SB 67 aim to stabilize the influx of inmates year-over-year and steadily decrease the total incarcerated population to avoid the oncoming hundreds of millions of added costs beyond the already bloated ADOC budget.

Illinois

The State of Illinois created the “Illinois State Commission on Criminal Justice and Sentencing Reform” to address its systemic mass incarceration problem. As of December 2015, Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) was operation at around 150 percent of design capacity. In Fiscal Year 2015, the IDOC housed 42,278 inmates, with the majority serving time for nonviolent offenses. Similar to the efforts in Georgia, in February 2015 Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner created the aforementioned Commission “to review the State’s current criminal justice and sentencing structure, sentencing practices, community supervision, and the use of alternatives to incarceration, and to make recommendations for amendments to state law that will reduce the State’s current prison population by 25 percent by 2025.”Footnote ³⁶

The incarceration rate in Illinois, adjusted for population growth, reveals a 500 percent increase over the past 40 years: by 1975, the state had 66 inmates imprisoned for every 100,000 citizens and by 2014, that number risen to 380 inmates per every 100,000 citizens.Footnote ³⁷ Recidivism, like in most other states, was a major problem and a problem the state tried to combat with ATCs, which allowed inmates to spend the final six to twenty-four months of their sentence in a community-based, work-release setting with subsidized housing. It was a good start to fighting the problem, but the total number of operational ATCs in Illinois peaked in 1986 with fifteen. Today only four are still in operation.Footnote ³⁸

In a 2008 IDOC recidivism study, the rate of recidivism after three years was 52.3 percent for inmates released by IDOC and 18 percent for inmates released from an ATC. Even the highest recidivism rate reported by an ATC, the Crossroads facility in Chicago’s west side, was 33 percent. The ATCs reduce inmate recidivism through a dedicated, five-level work program at each facility. Inmates have the opportunity to also work to earn educational certificates.

A second focus of the 2015 Commission is that of treatment of offenders through community support. Admitting to an overuse of prisons, the Commission found that the mass incarceration practices “stymied the development of a systemic ability to sanction, supervise, and treat offenders in the community.”Footnote ³⁹ Moreover, the 2015 Commission found that a disproportionate, “overwhelming majority” of people from Cook County sent to prison are from “impoverished, mostly African American neighbors on Chicago’s south and west sides.” Residents of those neighborhoods, as a result, have extreme distrust for the legitimacy of the corrections system. The lack of perceived authority not only increases the crime rate but also decreases the likelihood of those neighborhoods’ residents to report crimes and cooperate with police. Put curtly, the 2015 Commission “found that high levels of legal cynicism are associated with high rates of crime.”Footnote ⁴⁰

In December 2014, a bill was introduced to the Illinois General Assembly that would have amended the Criminal Identification Act to allow nonviolent felony offenders to protect their criminal records from potential employers. The proposal was to allow court-ordered sealing of some records if the offender earned an educational certification of a high school diploma or higher while as an inmate or on mandatory supervised release. Had the bill passed, eligible offenders would be able to petition the courts to have their record sealed, with a judge deciding if the petition would be granted or not. While this effort never gained any traction, other bills in the state are, including one to remove the barriers for obtaining professional licenses. The 2015 Commission recommendation provides an opportunity to take a second look at the right of offenders to protect themselves from undue discrimination by job recruiters. Education remains a primary barrier to decreasing recidivism in inmates in Illinois. Less than half of inmates have a partial or complete high school education, with the vast majority reading at a less-than sixth grade proficiency. Additionally, around half of inmates were assessed as urgently needing substance abuse treatment.

Two of the 2015 Commission recommendations are worth noting for their specific efforts to reform the severity of prison sentencing. Recommendation #5 is to “prevent the use of prison for felons with short lengths of stay,” with short lengths meaning less than twelve months.Footnote ⁴¹ The IDOC estimates that “more than 10,000 offenders” per year are sentenced to prison yet serve less than twelve months of time. Put simply, “using prison to house short-time inmates is wasteful at best and counterproductive at worst.”Footnote ⁴² State prisons, compared to local jails, are expensive and time-intensive. Most importantly, inmates who “stay in prison for only a few months do not have time to participate in programming in that will assist with rehabilitation.”Footnote ⁴³ The short-term use of state prisons is wasteful for IDOC and harmful to the present and future of offenders. Recommendation #7 requires “that a judge explain at sentencing why incarceration is an appropriate sentence” when an offender has no prior violent crime convictions or probation sentences.Footnote ⁴⁴ The goal is to provide a public argument and rationalization for why incarceration is necessary in the specific instance. The alternatives of a mandatory supervised release or rehabilitation program provide a less costly and harsh sentence. In Fiscal Year 2015, the IDOC estimates that around 30 percent of inmates had no prior probation sentence and 58 percent had no prior convictions for violent crimes.Footnote ⁴⁵ The added articulation is intended to “reveal cases where imprisonment is unnecessary.”Footnote ⁴⁶

The reforms that are happening in Illinois are important to strengthen the perceived legitimacy of the corrections program and in restoring trust in the populace that the system will do its work and root out injustices. As with most other states, recidivism remains a problem, but many of the reforms take necessary steps toward reducing the problem. The changes that affect the long-term legislative and enforcement mindset of those making policy are most important, and hopefully more of the Commission’s recommendations have an effect on the legislation coming out of the state over the next several years. It is a promising start, and the state is ahead of many of its peers in reform, but the changes need to happen at the legislative level to see the fruit of the proposals.

Utah

Utah ranks well below the national average in its total prison population but has a major problem common in the age of mass incarceration: growing prison populations coinciding with falling crime rates. In 2013, Utah incarcerated 244 people for every 100,000 citizens, more than 43 percent below the national average rate of 428 per 100,000 citizens.Footnote ⁴⁷ Utah’s crime rate is falling – between 2004 and 2013 the violent crime rate fell 4 percent and the property crime rate fell by 27 percent. Yet, while Utah’s rate of imprisonment is low relative to other states, it is still growing even as crime slows. Utah legislators are beginning to focus on reversing Utah’s continually growing prison population. Utah’s prison population has grown by 18 percent over the past decade, six times the national growth rate.Footnote ⁴⁸

Even more critical is the impending prison population growth rate: a recent Pew Charitable Trusts report found that, with Utah’s current sentencing policies and rehabilitation programs, the state’s inmate population would grow by 37 percent over the next twenty years.Footnote ⁴⁹ The estimated 2,700 additional inmates would cost Utah more than $500 million in revenue, $25 million more per year.Footnote ⁵⁰ This staggering total is the result of incremental year over year increases in Utah’s tough on crime attitude over the past several decades.

Much like Alabama, Utah partnered with the JRI as well as the Pew Charitable Trusts. The goal of the partnership was to analyze the situation and propose legislation to reverse the influx of inmates to the state. Legislation HB 348, proposed in February 2015 and signed into law March 2015, came about as a direct result of Utah’s commissioned research, known as the Utah Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice. The Commission developed eighteen policies that aim to improve the use of state prisons for more serious and violent offenders and strengthen existing communities and rehabilitation programs by expanding and improving reentry and treatment services.

One critical aspect of HB 348 the Commission focused on was the downgrading of both first- and second-time drug possession convictions from felonies to misdemeanors. The Commission recommended another 241 misdemeanors be downgraded to citations to no longer allow for arrest or jail sentencing. The downgrades are an attempt to funnel less offenders toward arrest and prison and more toward community-based treatment. The Commission’s executive director, Ron Gordon, believes this exhaustive overhaul must be given a few years to show results. Appropriately, the Commission will continue to survey the state of the Utah Department of Corrections (UDOC) and the sentencing practices of state court judges. The intention of HB 348 is to shift the focus of UDOC to reentry. The focus is now on what they are going to do on the outside of the cell walls.

Although Utah’s status quo is far from as dismal as Alabama’s or Illinois’, the state still faces the challenge of improving treatment for mental and substance abuse disorders. The Commission’s Gordon also highlighted the focus on treatment in HB 348, especially when it comes to the oversight and workload of parole and probation officers. The underlying problem is Utah’s high recidivism rate, as more than 46 percent of Utah’s inmates released from state prison return within three years.Footnote ⁵¹ By decreasing many felonies to misdemeanors and redirecting much UDOC funding to parole and adult treatment programs, HB 348 aims to lower that recidivism rate.

The decrease in Utah’s overall crime is a point of hope but should not overshadow the need for immediate and drastic improvement for those already in the system. Utah’s high rate of imprisonment per citizen is most troubling. Offenders on probation or parole are failing at the highest rates in a decade. Despite the low number of violent offenders, nonviolent offenders continue to make up the majority of state inmates. Parole violators accounted for 67 percent of state prison admissions in 2013, revealing a massive flaw in the treatment of those currently in the system.Footnote ⁵²

With nonviolent offenders making up 62 percent of new criminal conviction sentences in 2013, HB 348 is working to redress probation and parole.Footnote ⁵³ The vast majority of those who returned to state prison for violating probation or parole had committed at least one previous nonviolent offense. That is to say, those who were on probation or parole for nonviolent offenses and violated the conditions of their release did so via a new nonviolent offense. UDOC’s parole system is unsuccessful at an enormous level, with a lack of effective transitional services making it likely that current inmates will return as new inmates are added. It is a growing cycle that needs to be broken for Utah to avoid the forecasted increases in the prison population. The Utah Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice will continue to monitor the results of HB 348 over the next several years. The Commission’s priority is to continue to provide data and policy suggestions to Utah’s legislature to improve the state’s criminal justice system.

Utah’s deliberate actions to mitigate over criminalization discourage recidivism through transitional programs and consistent reform of the penal code. It is a promising picture of what many states could accomplish in the next decade with comparatively aggressive practices.

Nebraska

Nebraska rivals Alabama when it comes to overcrowding, with facilities operating at 159 percent capacity in Fiscal Year 2014, with 5,221 people.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the previous decade, Nebraska saw spending on corrections rise more than 20 percent from $131 million to $157 million as the state inmate population grew.Footnote ⁵⁵ The bleak outlook requires immediate action. Under current projections from the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services (NDCS), the prison population will increase by 7 percent by Fiscal Year 2020.Footnote ⁵⁶ This would push the 159 percent overcrowded population to 170 percent of capacity.Footnote ⁵⁷ In an attempt to solve this crisis, the Nebraska legislature proposed in October 2014 that the NDCS add 1,100 beds to the existing prison systems at an estimated cost of $262 million.Footnote ⁵⁸ This proposal represented the traditional solution of allocating money in an attempt to solve a problem, which is ineffective.

Four months later, in January 2015, the Nebraska legislature introduced another proposal: LB 605. The aims of LB 605 were to decrease the overall state inmate population while prioritizing prison space for those convicted of violent crimes through diverting funds and inmates to treatment and reentry programs. The legislation amended probation for greater use for those convicted of low-level offenses, ensures moderate supervision for those released, and improved funding to parole supervision needs. LB 605 passed unanimously and Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts signed the bill into law on May 29, 2015.Footnote ⁵⁹

The pragmatic goal of LB 605, according to primary sponsor Senator Heath Mello, is a decrease from 159 percent capacity to 140 percent capacity within five years, a drawdown of 624 inmates to a new total of 4,597. This would also help avoid an onslaught of possible federal lawsuits and more than $300 million in new prison construction. The Council of State Governments Justice Center has led the creation of LB 605 and will continue to help assess its initial results and further amendments.Footnote ⁶⁰

The June 2014 report on Nebraska from the Council of State Governments Justice Center outlined the scary outlook Nebraska was facing without LB 605.Footnote ⁶¹ Measuring a decade period, from 2002 to 2012, the report laid out statistical problems facing the state. While Nebraska’s resident population rose by 7.5 percent, the number of reported index crimes decreased 24 percent and arrests decreased 17 percent, putting Nebraska’s property and violent crime rates below the national average.Footnote ⁶² Despite having the twenty-fourth lowest index crime rates in the United States, Nebraska had felony district court case filing increases. Criminal felony case filings increased by 10 percent, and by 2012 Nebraska had the twelfth lowest probation rate in the United States as the probation population had fallen 27 percent.Footnote ⁶³ At the same time, with population rising but reported crimes and probation rates falling, Nebraska’s prison population still rose 20 percent.Footnote ⁶⁴

As court filings piled up and the prison population continued to rise, state spending rose for the Nebraska Department of Correctional Service. Across that decade, Nebraska’s spending on corrections rose 34 percent to $157 million and the number of prison admissions began to surpass the number of releases at an increasingly higher rate each year. Prison admissions increased 22 percent to 3,351 inmates per year while releases increased 18 percent to 3,113. New sentences (which excludes those sentenced for revoking their probation) rose 34 percent to account for more than three quarters of admissions. Even more importantly, while the average time served by inmates remained stable across that decade, the number of people completing sentences of six months or less increased 5 percent. Additionally, by fiscal year 2013 more than one-third of those released by NDCS had no supervision.Footnote ⁶⁵ From 1995 to 2005 the state inmate population also grew by 34 percent and overcrowding in NDCS dates back to the 1980s, with no prison operating at less than 100 percent.Footnote ⁶⁶ When the NDCS built more correctional facilities in 2006 to alleviate the problem, the new facilities simply filled up and the problem continued.

The early 2000s represented a further shift away from community supervision alternative programs in the NDCS. Incarceration was used more and alternatives used less for low-risk offenders, and the lengths of sentences increased. The Platte Institute published a February 2015 report which found that “a presumptive sentencing policy is important” to resolve Nebraska’s high admission rate of low-risk offenders.Footnote ⁶⁷ There is “a role for elected lawmakers to provide guidance that channels the exercise of [judicial] discretion through creating a presumptive sentence that can help prioritize prison space for violent and dangerous offenders.”Footnote ⁶⁸ LB 605, almost in response to these findings and those of CSGJC, will in part attempt to accomplish just that.

Rehabilitation is the flip-side to sentencing and Nebraska, both before and after LB 605, invests millions of dollars each year to fund rehabilitation programs. Working in conjunction with the NDCS, CSGJC assessed “institutional programs to identify how the department can modify its investments to maximize recidivism reduction.”Footnote ⁶⁹The CSGJC published a June 2016 report, just over a year after the passage of LB 605, and found that NDCS programs are both “state-of-the-art” and underutilized. The report found that those “who need these programs face clear and persistent barriers to accessing them.”Footnote ⁷⁰ While the treatment of the programs themselves is above average, inefficient bureaucracy destroys any potential benefit: “One-third of people within a year of their parole eligibility date are denied a parole hearing due to a lack of programming, leading to numerous people [exiting state prison] without supervision.”Footnote ⁷¹ The NDCS existing programs “do not fully use the many assessment results available in an inmate’s pre-sentence investigation and often duplicates assessments unnecessarily” despite the NDCS having very accurate risk assessment tools.Footnote ⁷² The NDCS is able to group inmates according to the likelihood of recidivism in three segments – low-risk (9 percent likelihood of reoffending), moderate-risk (34 percent likelihood of reoffending), and high-risk (59 percent likelihood of reoffending) – yet incomplete programming eliminates hope of treatment for 33 percent of these inmates.Footnote ⁷³

Beyond treatment as a whole is the participation in juvenile reentry programs. In 2013, with the passage of LB 561, the Nebraska legislature established the “Community-based Juvenile Services Aid Program.”Footnote ⁷⁴ This was one of the first efforts, just before LB 605, to reassess community treatment and reentry of state inmates. Year after year since its passage the CJSA Program has received increased funding, from an initial $3 million to its most recent $7 million for 2015. An underlying principle of the CJSA Program makes it stand out from previous efforts for juvenile correctional treatment: “It is essential that communities have programs to prevent youth from becoming unnecessarily involved in the juvenile justice system.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Through individual comprehensive community teams, the CJSA Program is a system of careful planning to assess existing programs while implementing “preventative measures to keep youth from entering the juvenile justice system, pinpoint duplication and gaps in services to youth,” while focusing on evidence-based treatment strategies.Footnote ⁷⁶ Current community plans represents seventy-two counties and two federally recognized Indian tribes. The Juvenile Justice Institute assesses the effectiveness of the program and found, after surveying 130 programs, that “the strongest positive impact on recidivism to four general characteristics: 1) treatment modality; 2) amount of services; 3) quality of service; and 4) the risk level of the juveniles served.” In an analysis of six respondents, five of the six programs “reported that the quasi-experimentally designed study found their program to be effective.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Nebraska represents a unique opportunity to implement prison population reduction policies in a state that already has a decreasing overall crime rate. It is clear that Nebraska’s long history of overcrowding has reached an emergency crisis point requiring an immediate and new approach. This last attempt (LB 605) appears to be an adequate first attempt to remedy the problem, as it is addressing both the source of the problem (through reforming the prioritization of violent crime offenders and access to parole programs for low-risk offenders) and the treatment inmates need to receive before reentering their communities.

Texas

Texas has more people behind bars than any other state in the nation. It is a problem that has plagued their justice system for decades, but has not gone without significant effort toward reform and change. In 2007, the Texas prison population was at 150,000 and was projected to grow by more than 17,000 over the five following years. To compensate for the growth, the state was planning an additional three prisons to be constructed at a cost of $530 million. Instead of spending the money, a member of the House of Representatives and the chair of the Senate criminal justice committee came up with an idea: invest that money into the inmates at most risk to be repeat offenders to curb the flow of recidivism. With success, there would be less need for adding prison beds as fewer released prisoners would be returning.Footnote ⁷⁸

The state devoted $270 million to this idea, researching the strongest areas requiring investment to break the recidivism cycle, and gained bipartisan support due to the cost savings of nearly half of the money set aside to build new prisons. These new initiatives also “improved addiction treatment, boosted education opportunities and rebuilt the juvenile justice system where chronic sexual abuse was rife.”Footnote ⁷⁹ New programs, money, and personnel led to results which were huge: “parole went from 22,000 a year with 11,000 revocations to 29,000 with 6000 revocations. Improved efficiencies resulted in the wait for parole dropping from one year to 90 days, which saved $20 million in prisoner costs.”Footnote ⁸⁰

Overall the reforms not only stopped the projected growth of 17,000 prisoners, they actually reduced the prison population by 3000 and the state began actually closing prisons.Footnote ⁸¹ The results went even further than the prison system as the crime and arrest rate dropped as well. The type of people imprisoned are different, to put it lightly, “the prison mix has changed with more dangerous offenders (those we fear) in custody and less of the knuckleheads (that make us mad).”Footnote ⁸² One of the elected officials sponsoring the bill calmed the irrational fears that some have with prison reductions by saying, “We weren’t soft on crime we just were smart on crime.”Footnote ⁸³ It is a method that is starting to work, and other states are noticing the success.

Also in 2007 there were a series of changes at various levels of government and the criminal justice in the state. Alongside the previously mentioned legislation was a significant reduction in the state’s juvenile justice system. While the changes to the prohibition system capped the growth and help lower recidivism, there needed to be other ways to continue to curb recidivism and slow the number of people entering prisons for nonviolent offenses. Currently, numerous bills are being debated and enacted, from changing property theft thresholds to sentences for low-level drug crimes, which are projected to save the state hundreds of millions of dollars to put toward treatment not available in prisons.Footnote ⁸⁴

There were also several abuse scandals involving the Texas Youth Commission in 2007 that forced the state to investigate the juvenile justice system. When the scandal broke, the Texas Youth Prison system held 4,200 young men and women. Today it holds 1,000 inmates, a 76 percent reduction.Footnote ⁸⁵ The juvenile crime rate has dropped, not because of a complicated reform bill, but rather because of a realization that “[t]here wasn’t a public safety justification for locking up so many youth, and the Legislature last session moved to divert even more youthful offenders from state lockups to community based corrections.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Reforms were implemented that aided in the reduction: “The legislature passed reforms aimed at banning the commitment of juveniles to secure state facilities for misdemeanor offenses, reducing the maximum age in which juveniles would be permitted in those facilities, and redirecting certain offenders toward evidence based community programs instead of jailing them.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Each of these reforms show a posture toward juvenile justice that is working to end the prison pipeline and source of mass incarceration. That reduction in juvenile crime also saves the state money to put toward other juvenile programs: once source cited in 2016 said the state had already saved $200 million.Footnote ⁸⁸

Much is being done with the juvenile justice system in Texas, and there are still major problems to overcome. One of these problems is receiving little attention but is an injustice that many are trying to fight every year: Texas teenagers are considered adults once they turn seventeen, although federal law states they are not adults until eighteen. This discrepancy places younger teens in adult prisons where there is “a serious risk of abuse of young inmates by older ones and puts most county jails out of compliance with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act, which treats 17 year olds as juveniles.”Footnote ⁸⁹ This means adult jails do not meet juvenile jail standards and the cost is too much to change them, and is a reason according to the Texas Observer that Texas Sheriffs’ Association came out as a large supporter of the “Raise the Age” legislation.Footnote ⁹⁰

Some of the most recent changes to the Texas system came in 2013, adding to the 2007 changes that earned the state acclaim because of its stereotype as being “tough on crime.”Footnote ⁹¹ The Texas legislature cut $97 million from the budget of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to make it clear that “their intent was to reduce [the capacity of prisons].”Footnote ⁹² In 2011, they had already proved that it was possible by closing three youth facilities (590 beds), a feat that was possible after several years of declines.Footnote ⁹³ Today there are half as many youth facilities as there were in 2006 in Texas, and the state is beginning to enact the same policies with adult prisons. Time will tell if the Texas method will become a popular one for other states to adopt.

Minnesota

Minnesota has historically had a criminal justice and penal system known for its low prison population and for pushing rehabilitation as a philosophy of punishment. According to a 2015 essay by Andy Mannix, the 1980s and 1990s helped solidify this picture of the state, especially when the prison populations in places like California were quickly growing.Footnote ⁹⁴ His essay asks a simple but provocative question in the title, “Minnesota crime is at a 50-year low. So why are we imprisoning more people than ever?”Footnote ⁹⁵

By 1990 the prison population was growing but far slower than the national averages. By 2000 that number had nearly doubled, and is still lingering at those numbers by the time of Mannix’s essay in 2015. A report from 1999 quoted the former corrections officer, as other states moved to more “punitive-minded” punishment tactics, that Minnesota “never really deviated from its early hope that the operation of prisons would result in a safer society by making prisoners better people.”

Minnesota was among the first states to battle the problem and worked to get ahead of the mass incarceration issue before it got out of control – implementing guidelines for punishment to ensure that punishments fit the crimes being punished. They even had a task force in place to make sure that prisons did not become overcrowded. By the early 2000s the population was growing faster than ever – the system was threatened with overcrowding, and the growth seemed to stay steady without any policy changes or pushes for reform. “I’m not seeing anywhere near the same reform spirit that we had 30 to 40 years ago,” said David Schultz, a political science professor at Hamline University, in the essay, “I think we’re making it easier for people to get in prison.”Footnote ⁹⁶

What caused the change in mindset? One Minnesota justice said that the rise can be explained by the sheer number of criminal statutes in the laws of the state: the criminal code was 65 pages long in 1965 and 228 pages in 2013. The justice commented, “if the code continues to grow at that pace, it will hit 1,770 pages 50 years from now.”Footnote ⁹⁷ The problem is a common one. The legal director for the local ACLU chapter said, “I can’t remember a legislative session where the Legislature didn’t create new crimes and enhanced penalties … So when you have longer sentences, you’re going to have more people in prison.”Footnote ⁹⁸

The bump in sentencing is due to a number of factors: enhanced sentencing policy on drugs and DUI’s account for many of the new arrests, and many other types of crime received increased penalties. Mannix pointed out the jump in drug sentencing almost doubled the number of people incarcerated for substances: “from 2000 to 2005, the number of Minnesotans in prison for drug offenses more than doubled to 2,178. To put it in perspective, that’s more than the state’s entire prison population circa 1981.”Footnote ⁹⁹ There is some hope, however, because that number fell to 1,633 by 2013. Many of the drug-related arrests are not for low-level substance, and half of those in prison are there for a methamphetamine-related crime. Recidivism is high in Minnesota as well, with about 60 percent of prison sentences going to probation and supervised release violations.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

While many think that reform will be hard to implement, the state legislature worked hard to pass a new reform bill in 2016 aimed at bringing some change to the current trend.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The bill, which passed unanimously, is one of the most significant reforms of criminal justice in decades for the state. It changes several key elements of the system and importantly demonstrates the legislature is committed to efforts to change their philosophical approach toward punishment. The bill was proposed as a way to reduce sentences in some cases, raise the bar for high-level charges, and free up prison beds by using rehab as an alternative to jail cells. The bill’s Senate sponsor Sen. Ron Latz quantified the objectives, estimating that by diverting some into treatment, the measure would free up more than 600 prison beds over time.

Overall, the bill looks to more effectively sentence those with drug-related crimes and to work on employing the money to better use in rehabilitation and treatment, and is a step in reducing both the prison population and the number of new prisoners being admitted. The bill suggests another focus on how drug problems can be dealt with, a focus on rehabilitation instead of incarceration.

A more drastic approach came in 2014 when the state sent a message that it cared about the problem on a broader scale. Minnesota rid the state’s criminal code of 1,175 obsolete laws making the process simpler, and lessening the burden of the law on the people of the state.Footnote ¹⁰² The laws included everything from tax-related issues to permits, representing a wish to reduce the code to help stop the flow of people both entering the courtroom and the jail cell.

Michigan

Michigan has spent years working on ways to curb recidivism and successfully reintegrate former inmates into society. The effects of recidivism are multifaceted – affecting economic, social, and cultural life – and places like Michigan have been hard hit by the prison cycle it causes. The Michigan Prisoner Reentry Initiative (MPRI) started in 2005 under the Michigan Department of Corrections to help reduce recidivism by investing the ways to stop future criminal activity through education. In Michigan, like many other states, a large part of the overcriminalization problem is connected to recidivism. Many states cannot figure out how to slow recidivism, and their prison populations stay stagnant.

The mission of the MPRI program, as one article in the Michigan Policy Network put it, is “to educate prisoners on how to adjust back into the public sphere by the time their minimum term of imprisonment has been completed.”Footnote ¹⁰³ It is a simple formula of assistance: when an inmate’s release time is near they are provided resources that will help them find housing, new jobs, and healthcare, including a variety of substance abuse and mental health treatments. When the article was published in 2015 the prison population in Michigan had dropped 15 percent from its 2007 high – something many believe is a result of the MPRI program. The main focus of the program is on investing in the areas that will ensure someone will not return to prison or commit the same crimes once outside the cell. The article highlighted some positive changes coming with the new parts of the program including a partnership with colleges, “to provide post-secondary schooling options, along with instituting options to offer education on skilled trades.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ An American Bar Association (ABA) study quoted by the Michigan Policy Network also said that the program contributed to “reducing the prison population in Michigan by 7,500.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The article concluded that: “out of the 22,000 participants in the program, the rate of returning to prison for a new crime is at its lowest number since 1995.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The program is still currently undergoing many improvements, and is not immune to critics, many of whom believe that the program is too costly, and the benefits and inmate reduction is coming from other sources. The program overall has not lessened the costs of the corrections department, and many have questioned the management of the program as one that can have long-term sustainability. However, it is hard to argue with the numbers that the MPRI has behind its work: 33 percent fewer returns to prison for violating parole of committing a new crime, a prison population that has dropped from 51,554 to under 46,000, and three prisons closed in 2010, all at a savings of $118 million.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ According to the ABA, it seems that the concerns over cost are less worrisome than some think: if you compare the money spent on the program to the amount it takes to house an inmate for a year ($34,000), the $56 million a year seems small when one considers the 25,000 inmates who participated in the program.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Another article in Michigan policy network highlighted a different solution to Michigan’s incarceration problem. Between 1980 and 2010 Michigan’s prison population was growing twenty-nine times faster than the general population, and the average time served was well above the national average of 2.6 years at more than six years.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ A report cited in the article, titled “Denying Parole at First Eligibility: How Much Public Safety Does It Actually Buy?,” by the Citizens Alliance on Prisons and Public Spending (CAPPS) found that problems with the rate of parole approvals was leading to a large proportion of inmates being held longer than might have been necessary.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Problems like the one the CAPPS report suggested are the ones that programs like MPRI set out to fix – making sure that inmates could succeed outside of the prison walls as soon as possible, and hopefully not have to return.

Perhaps the biggest change and provides the most hope for Michigan’s overcriminalization problem is one that has to do with criminal intent or mens rea on the part of the accused. It is an issue that is just starting to be discussed in many states, but one Michigan has worked toward reforming over the last couple years. A study conducted in 2014 by the Manhattan Institute and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy found that the state had 3,102 statutory crimes that lay outside the penal code, and that for 26 percent of the felonies and more than 59 percent of the misdemeanors the state did not have to show mens rea on the part of the accused.Footnote ¹¹¹ A reform to this practice appeared in 2015 when the Governor signed a bill establishing a default criminal-intent standard for Michigan.Footnote ¹¹² This reform ensured that, “the state had to show that a defendant acted with intent, knowledge, or recklessness to convict him of a crime unless the state legislature clearly specified a lower level of mental culpability in the criminal statute.”Footnote ¹¹³ The new bill is not perfect, and has gained some scrutiny for not having enough scope in what parts of the penal code it affects, but it is an important step in the direction of reducing injustices in the system and unnecessary penal codes from the books. Perhaps most importantly, it shows an openness and a prioritization for criminal justice reform by the state’s leadership. The type of reforms happening in Michigan have a chance for permanence – not only to reduce prison populations but to also change an entire system.

Conclusion

For those truly seeking to advocate for criminal justice reform, Washington, DC, should not be the focus. Personalist criminal justice reform directs our attention to the local sources of overcriminalization and mass incarceration – viz., the states. The focus for criminal justice reform must be with state legislatures and county/city officials. It is at the local level that change is going to come. Federal drugs laws, and the sentencing therein, most certainly must be reformed. However, the majority of criminal justice reform progress will come at the local level. This will require a new generation of reformers who work at the state levels and can conceptualize new localized paradigms to combat overcriminalization.

Many national problems are slow to be solved because of the sheer size of the challenge and logistical problems with implementation across the country. The need for criminal justice reform is acknowledged by most major segments of society, and it can reasonably and realistically be implemented because local actions are ground zero. With a multitude of successful examples, each state can create a tailored approach to reducing their population of the incarcerated. It is this liberation of these citizens which will unleash the potential and productivity of local communities. Many areas of the nation are suffering because they lack a home grown and engaged blue collar workforce. Each of our cities and major regional corridors require hundreds of billions of restoration and maintenance work. There is an abundance of talent that can be unlocked through immediate and direct actions to reduce the populations of state prisons. Methods have been proven effective, and the major requirement is a collective moral reasoning that criminal justice reform is a national priority and the tools at the disposal of states need to be unleashed aggressively.