PENN LIVE: …The prison population started to level off after the implementation of changes made possible by the 2012 Justice Reinvestment Act, [John] Wetzel said, which allowed courts to steer more low-level offenders away from state prisons through the use of electronic monitoring programs, halfway houses and the like.
“When you put low-risk offenders in the state prison they come out worse,” Wetzel said Tuesday. “That doesn’t make sense for anybody.”
Those and other internal departmental changes have now led to significant inmate count downturns in each of the last two years… (more)
