INDIANAPOLIS — Like many of his colleagues around the state, Floyd County Prosecutor Steve Henderson got up early Tuesday to drive to the Statehouse for a committee hearing on a sweeping sentencing reform bill.
After sitting through hours of testimony on legislation that would curb the costs of the state’s growing prison population, his frustration was evident.
“I didn’t hear the word ‘victim’ spoken once,” Henderson said. “What about the costs to victims?”
He wasn’t the only local law enforcement official in the room suspicious of a sentencing reform bill that would shorten some drug sentences and divert low-level offenders from state prisons and back into local communities.
Don Travis, chief probation officer in Howard County and head of the Probation Officers Professional Association of Indiana, said he’s a supporter of sentencing reform. His fear is that there won’t be enough money to make it work.
“All we’re trying to say is: we need resources,” Travis said.
The bill has the potential to save the state more than $1.2 billion in prison costs by steering lower-level offenders into probation, community corrections, and drug treatment programs instead of prison.
Some of that money would go to counties to fund community-based monitoring programs, but exactly how much is yet to be determined.
State Sen. Susan Glick, R-LaGrange, said the estimated $5 million annually that would be shifted into local communities isn’t much when it has to be divvied up among 92 counties.
“That won’t even pay for a probation officer, a desk, and lamp,” Glick said during a break in the hearing.
The sentencing reform bill has strong support from Statehouse leaders, including Gov. Mitch Daniels and Indiana Supreme Court Chief Justice. It’s based on work done by the Council of State Governments’ Justice Center, a prison policy group, in partnership with the Pew Center on the States’ Public Safety Performance Project.
Their study, released last year, found that Indiana’s prison count had grown by 41 percent between 2000 and 2009. The study also said the increase was caused not by violent criminals but by low-level, nonviolent criminals committing drug and property crimes.
The study also found that Indiana’s criminal sentences were harsher than other states.
Those conclusions were cited by Jon Ozmint, the former head of the South Carolina prison system who helped spearhead a sentencing reform movement in his state.
“We will lock you up for pretty near anything in South Carolina,” Ozmint said. “But you’re locking up folks even we don’t lock up.”
That kind of criticism drew appreciation from supporters of the bill, including State Budget Director Adam Horst, who vowed to work with legislators to find the funding to support the reform initiatives that would shift costs away from the state and back to local communities.
But it didn’t please many of the local prosecutors at the hearing, unhappy that they’ve been accused of being obstructionists. In December, the board of the Association of Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys voted to oppose the portion of the bill that would shorten sentences for some drug crimes. They’ve also insisted that the sentencing reform bill increase the actual amount of time that violent offenders serve by reducing or eliminating credits earned for early release.
“We’re all in agreement that there needs to be reform,” Henderson said. “We’re just concerned that this not comprehensive reform.”