Prisons Feeling Economic Crunch
- March 25, 2009
- by Collateral Staff
The International Herald Tribune is reporting on the latest casualty of the financial crisis - the prison system. For decades, prison populations have been increasing, in large part due to minimum sentencing requirements, 3-strike laws, and harsh sentencing for non-violent drug offenders. Instead of focusing on prison reform, the solution to the problem of over-crowded prisons was simply building more prisons or contracting with private prisons. However, as counties and states are watching their budgets shrink and are feeling the money crunch, simply throwing money at the problem is no longer working. Instead, states such as Colorado and Nevada are closing prisons, while other states such as New Jersey and Kansas are replacing jail time for certain crimes with community service hours. Even California, the state with the most overcrowded prisons, is considering switching to rehabilitation programs for drug offenders instead of incarceration.
With states looking for more cost effective ways of handling non-violent offenders, perhaps now is a good time for bail agents to start reminding local government officials that electronic monitoring for certain offenders can be provided by the private sector at a fraction of the cost of imprisonment.
