PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS:
…In his budget address, Rendell called for an increase of $137 million for the Department of Corrections, about 7 percent. Of that, $13 million will be spent on providing 2,000 more beds in new housing units to deal with overcrowding. This increase will put the state’s corrections budget at $2 billion – 7 percent of the total state budget…
But we disagree with Rendell on one fundamental: Prison costs are not “fixed” costs as he claims, offering little or no discretion. Pennsylvania’s prison crisis is rooted in laws and policies that can be changed…
For example, according to another Pew study, Pennsylvania has the second-longest prison sentences in the nation…
Back in 1984, the Legislature passed the first laws imposing mandatory minimum sentencing. Initially, it applied only to violent crimes, DUI’s, and repeat offenders. However, lawmakers expanded the criminal code to include many drug crimes in 1988 and again in 1995. As a result, Pennsylvania’s prison population exploded, growing by 280 percent in less than three decades.
Click here to read the full article.
I think we need to offer our prison population a wholesale furlough.
Not all of them, of course. Just those convicted of non-violent drug crimes not involving children..
Give them 30 days freedom, after which they should report back to prison. If they are caught in state after those 30 days, and convicted of a felony committed after they were released, they’d have to not only serve the rest of their original sentence, but serve additional time for “escape”. However, if they left the state, we would decline to extradite them.
That surely would reduce the population of the state prisons, and help with our budget problems, while presenting relatively little danger to the public – especially the Pennsylvania public.