Incoming Ohio Governor Kasich having to face over-crowded prisons and tight budgets

The Columbus Dispatch this morning has an above-the-fold, front-page article on Ohio's prison problems.  Here are lengthy excerpts from this effective article, which is headlined "Prison reform awaits Kasich; Changing overcrowded system won't be easy":

[Ohio] prison administrators have been pushing for years to stem the tide of incoming inmates to save money and reduce crowding.  Ohio prisons house 50,976 offenders (33 percent over capacity), have a staff of more than 13,300 employees and a two-year, $3.54 billion budget.

That makes prisons one of the largest single categories in the state budget, accounting for roughly 7 percent of general fund spending, and a top target for cutbacks as state officials struggle to deal with an impending $8 billion shortfall.

Gov.-elect John Kasich has made it clear that changes in prisons, including privatization and sentencing reform, will be in his sights when he takes office Jan. 10.  "Everything is on the table. Is it possible to have private companies run prisons, build prisons?  Of course it is; we're looking at it," Kasich told The Dispatch last week.  "But corrections reform is critical.  It's one of the big cost sinks that we have.  We've got some states that are releasing people because they can't control their costs. We have to think intelligently about how we're going to do this."

Kasich, who beat incumbent Democrat Gov. Ted Strickland last month, said locking up offenders who have committed "relatively minor crimes" in costly state prisons "doesn't make sense to me.  "You want to put your prisoners in an environment where the public is safe, but where it's the least costly," he said.

One of the complaints Kasich has voiced frequently since the Nov. 2 election is that Ohio locks up "check-kiters and people who don't pay child support" when they could be punished at lower cost outside prison.  However, the state prison census shows there were 51 offenders behind bars for writing bad checks and 372 for failure to pay child support. Those categories, combined, account for less than 1 percent of the total prison population.

Cutting costs sounds reasonable but isn't easy in an overcrowded system with high security needs and court-ordered mandates for medical and mental-health care of inmates.

New Department of Rehabilitation and Correction budget estimates reveal the consequences of even a 10 percent cut, including the closing of prisons and the layoff of more than 2,500 employees.  It also could mean eliminating funding for 972 halfway-house beds, 1,547 community-diversion offenders and 2,200 offenders in city and county jail programs funded by the state.

As for privatizing, the state already contracts for the operation of two private prisons: North Coast Correctional Treatment Facility, a 552-bed, minimum-security facility for alcohol and drug offenders in Grafton in Lorain County, and the Lake Erie Correctional Institution, a 1,380-bed, minimum- and medium-security prison in Conneaut in Ashtabula County.  Both are operated by Management & Training Corp. of Centerville, Utah....

State lawmakers vigorously resisted a sentencing-reform proposal that had bipartisan support from the Strickland administration and state Sen. Bill Seitz, R-Cincinnati.

Included in Strickland's proposed two-year budget in 2009 -- but stripped out by fellow Democrats -- was a proposal to reduce the prison population by more than 6,400 inmates, saving $29.1 million annually. It would have granted "earned credit" to release 2,644 prisoners, diverted 2,644 nonviolent offenders to community programs, sentenced 527 child-support violators to community sanctions and reduced re-sentences for parole violations by 591.

Seitz introduced a version of the proposal, but it also died under withering criticism from prosecutors and conservative Republican legislators.  More recently, prisons chief Ernie Moore said he wants to reduce the prison population to 48,000 by 2013.  He plans to divert more inmates to transitional control, work with judges to reduce the number of offenders returned to prison for technical violations and boost community programs for higher-risk offenders.

I am very pleased to hear my new Governor say that "everything is on the table" for dealing with these prison crowding and expense issues in Ohio.  I wonder if that really include drug offense and structured sentencing reform as well as back-end sentencing policy changes like more earned-time credit. 

Among many interesting aspects of the Ohio sentencing and corrections story is the fact that, as detailed in this recent report, prison terms have gone up since the Ohio Supreme Court responded to the Blakely SCOTUS decision by giving Ohio sentencing judges greater sentencing discretion.  Unlike in the federal system, where the guidelines tend to drive up prison terms, in Ohio structured sentencing reforms tended to keep prison sentences down.  But since that structure became just advisory in Ohio, sentence lengths have crept up.