Indiana’s prison population just keeps climbing, and for the past four years, state legislators have been trying to figure out what to do about it.
There are so many Hoosiers in prison that the Indiana General Assembly could be on the verge of doing something previously unthinkable – funding alternative sentencing and drug treatment.
That won’t happen this year, but there’s a decent chance it will happen next year, when the next biennial budget is hammered out.
That’s because new state sentencing rules are about to send quite a few low-level offenders back to the counties to deal with. That’s why Howard County officials are getting estimates for turning the former Kokomo Academy into a work release center.
There’s even a provision in the latest criminal code update, House Bill 1006, which requires the Indiana Department of Corrections to somehow keep track of the number of inmates serving less time because of sentencing reform.
If the DOC has fewer prisoners to take care of, the thinking goes, the state could use that money to fund community corrections.
Larry Landis, head of the Indiana Public Defenders Council, said he doesn’t expect the DOC will rebate any funding to the state next March, but he does think the new sentencing laws “will push low-level people with addictions and mental health problems into county jails.”
Without funding for community corrections from the state, many of those people will simply re-offend, and will be sent to prison, negating any of the sentence reductions passed by the Legislature, Landis said.
Then there is are individual legislators – with State Sen. Randy Head, R-Logansport the prime culprit – who cannot resist the temptation to insert draconian measures into otherwise reform-minded legislation.
This year, Head managed to negate many of the sentence reduction provisions contained in the original criminal code reform bill, which passed in 2013. He was also instrumental in reducing the “good time credit” available to high-level offenders.
The concern is that Head, and the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council, won’t stop adding tweaks to the new reforms until we’re back to what we had before – a system where drug possession could net more prison time than aggravated assault.
There are now just under 30,000 Hoosiers in prison, more than quadruple the incarceration rate of the 1970s. About 60 percent of those inmates are incarcerated for relatively minor offenses – drug possession, drunk driving, theft – and will serve less than two years.