Cooking the Books on Prisons

Prosecutors are articulating a response to the Governor’s position on the state prisons and prison reform, specifically SB 561. I’m sympathetic to the notion that we shouldn’t just be warehousing a lot of our citizens in prisons under the guise of being “tough on crime.” But, Prosecutors are making some counterpoints that are difficult to ignore. In this case, it’s a column from Delaware County Prosecutor Jeffrey Arnold (h/t Indiana Law Blog) in the Muncie Star Press.

Particularly notable is the abrupt change in the availability in space at the DOC. The governor has apparently been trying to claim that our prisons are too crowded and the rate of incarceration is growing fast. This is a pretty significant departure from a few years ago when our prisons were going to be a profit center, causing us to import 1,200 Arizona inmates to New Castle to have themselves a riot.

From the Arnold column:

The crisis? Suddenly in 2010, the citizens of Indiana were being told that the Indiana Department of Correction is beyond capacity and climbing at a rate higher than any other state in the nation. Suddenly, there is no time to devote to comprehensive reform as this crisis is so acute the need for a quick fix takes priority over comprehensive reform.

The ticking clock is a pretty standard sales technique. “Buy now! Supplies are limited! A beauty like this isn’t going to stay on the lot long; there’s another couple who has their eye on this one.”

The truth is the prison population has remained essentially stable over the last four years. On Feb. 1, the Indiana prison population was 26,873, which was exactly the same as it was on Feb. 1, 2010.

On Feb. 1, 2009, it was 26,663 and the number Feb. 1, 2008, 26,299. This represents a 2.1-percent increase since 2008. The Pew Center on States issued a 2009 report that Indiana ranks eighth in the nation for persons under parole or supervision and ranks 30th in nation for people in prison. That same report indicated from 2006 to 2008 the increase in Indiana’s prison population was 0.6 percent and Kentucky was the highest at 12 percent.

Here is the fun part: the numbers relied on by the Governor to suggest a crisis apparently include federal inmates. The federal prison population is entirely separate from the state population, and if the Governor is using federal inmates to cook the books in support of this state legislation, that would seem to cross a line. Rumor has it that the Dept. of Corrections used to have some handy online charts detailing the state prison population that have been quietly removed from the website.

The more general argument prosecutors make in response to the sentencing reform legislation is that, with all of the credit time, inmates don’t serve anything like the number of years that judge’s sentence them to. (Of course, judges presumably know this and, to the extent they have discretion, factor that into their sentences.)

According to the Legislative Services Agency, the average sentence given by an Indiana judge to a Class A felony child molester is 41 years of incarceration. Yet, the average actual time served for that same Class A child molester is 7.5 years.

I don’t much mind the fact that the actual sentence is different from the nominal sentence. Credit time provides some valuable incentives to govern the prison population while they’re incarcerated, and it might be useful in making ours more of a “reformative” system of punishment instead of merely punitive. The real question is whether we’re punishing what we need to punish and doing so at the right levels. Hyping dubious prison population statistics only undermines what might be a rational solution to a real problem.