Petty felons get prison too often
Columbus Dispatch
Letter to the Editor
3/29/2008
Columbus attorney Harry R. Reinhart wrote this letter to the editor in response to an article and letter on prison populations in the Columbus Dispatch.
After reading Nancy Elliott’s Feb. 22 letter suggesting that I had complained about prison populations being swollen due to maximum sentences for dangerous criminals, I was forced to go back to the original Dispatch article (“Life terms pile up for rapists,” Feb. 11) to see if I said such a thing. After all, prison bed space is indeed designed for taking the dangerous criminal off the street for long periods of time. Why on earth would I make such a comment? Now, having refreshed my recollection, 1 realize that I did not “conveniently forget” that “cruel, merciless and unrepentant” criminals should be incarcerated, as suggested by Elliott.
Although the entire interview was not published, what I said and what reasonable readers would understand from the part quoted was that the General Assembly has passed laws that put far too many petty felons in prison — people who, to paraphrase Elliott, are not cruel, who do have mercy and who are repentant — thus limiting the beds available for the deserving. If Elliott would take the time to look beyond her vicarious pain and into the current demographic of the Ohio prison population, she would discover that the majority — indeed, the substantial majority — of prisoners are minor and petty offenders. Low-level drug offenders or folks sentenced for petty property offenses doing minimum or near-minimum sentences have swollen the prison population. These prisoners constitute the majority of the prison population. They should not.
Drug sweep at John Marshall High School is first of many for Cleveland schools
Cleveland Plain Dealer
3/25/2008
Raising fears among parents and students, Cleveland schools announced a lockdown drill and searched for drugs.
Police and security officers have begun making random sweeps of Cleveland schools in search of drugs.
The first sweep came Thursday at John Marshall High School. School security officers, city police and two drug-sniffing dogs went through lockers for two hours while students were kept in their classrooms.
No drugs were found, but schools security chief Lester Fultz said he is more interested in making a point than making arrests.
“The goal is to send a very strong message in terms of what is not allowed in the buildings,” he said. “We were not disappointed that we didn’t find anything.”
Cuyahoga County inmates could be freed if not indicted within 30 days
Cleveland Plain Dealer
3/24/2008
Police departments and prosecutors in Cuyahoga County must complete their investigations in a more timely fashion, according to a new rule.
A new rule adopted by judges in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court will release any county inmate bound over to a grand jury but not indicted within 30 days.
That means that absent some fundamental change in the way police and prosecutors do business, dozens of inmates on any given day could be turned loose as a result of the criminal justice system’s inefficiency.
The rule, which takes effect April 14, is modeled after one used in Montgomery County for more than 20 years. It is a paradoxical approach to court reform intended to spur local police departments and prosecutors to complete investigations more quickly – or be forced to track down the defendant all over again.
Judge Janet Burnside, chairwoman of the court’s criminal rules committee, said the court set a 30-day deadline more than 15 years ago. But without penalty, it remained largely unenforceable – until now.
“It’s a hammer; it’s a sanction on the rest of this law enforcement system that we’re releasing these people without bond if they’re not indicted,” Burnside said. “Could they be indicted the very next day? Sure. But you’re going to have to issue an arrest warrant and bring them back in, because they won’t be sitting around, languishing in County Jail.”
Our view: Ohio has to spend smarter on prisoners
Dayton Daily News
3/16/2008
The Dayton Daily News editorial comments on Ohio’s prison overcrowding problem.
The overcrowding problem in Ohio’s prisons is so awful that when Gov. Ted Strickland’s administration backed off double-bunking at Dayton’s two prisons, the concession — significant though it was here — barely rippled in Columbus.
Ohio’s corrections department has 12,000 more inmates than it has beds. Putting 450 to 500 more people in Dayton would have helped ease the situation, but it obviously wasn’t going to solve or even dent the problem.
So what is Ohio going to do with all the inmates it doesn’t have space for, especially when that number is projected to grow by 15,000 more by 2016?
It’s good that Terry Collins, the head of Ohio’s corrections department, is emphatically telling the governor and lawmakers that building more prisons is not the answer. Prisons are tremendously expensive to put up and to run, and, once they’re constructed, they will be filled. The only way prisons get shut down is by a court order — when they’re so old and foul that humans can’t be put in them.
But if not more cell blocks and razor wire, then what?
[...]
Ohio is putting a lot of people in prison who just a little over a decade ago would have gotten a lecture, probation or a free pass. Judges’ discretion has been taken away with mandatory sentences; some penalties have increased; new crimes have been identified. In many cases, the individuals — including repeat drunken drivers, those convicted of multiple and especially violent domestic violence charges, and sexual offenders who’ve served their time, but failed to register with authorities — deserve real punishment.
But the questions are at what cost and where.
Prison Director Collins recently told legislators that sending the wrong people to prison can actually do more harm than good. In making those choices, Mr. Collins said, “We need to figure out who’s bad and who we’re just mad at.”
Prisons need to be for the worst of the worst.
U.S. needs to change its drug war policy
Midland Daily News, MI
3/16/2008
This editorial was written while the author was in Columbia.
One of these days some American president will figure out that the drug problem is nothing more than Economics 101 — this is not tough intellectual stuff. We will make no progress so long as our approach is to attack the “supply”side as we currently do, sponsoring massive chemical defoliating programs designed to destroy the coca crop will not stop the inflow of product and will only worsen the economic conditions for the peasants of this region. And if it were successful, our program of crop destruction would only serve to drive the price of cocaine and crack in the United States up. That of course would only mean more street crime and murder on the streets of America — the demand for drugs of this nature is “inelastic” and therefore not subject to price sensitivity.
Long term reduction will occur only when we domestically attack the demand side of the equation. In other words, the problem is more of a U.S. domestic matter and not one of foreign policy.
Washington State Supreme Court Rules Random Drug Testing Violates Students’ Constitutional Rights
Drug Policy Alliance
3/13/2008
The Washington State Supreme Court has ruled that a random drug testing policy is unconstitutional.
The Washington State Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Wahkiakum School District’s random drug testing policy is unconstitutional and violates student athletes’ rights under the higher privacy protections of article I, section 7 of the Washington State Constitution.
The Drug Policy Alliance and the Washington Education Association (WEA) filed an amicus curiae (friend-of-the-court) brief in the case arguing that random student drug testing is unsupported by scientific research, may deter students from participating in extracurricular activities, undermines trust in student-teacher relationships while creating a hostile school environment and may evoke oppositional behavior in students who may try to “beat” the test, among other concerns
The Rockefeller Drug Laws: 35 Years of Unjust, Biased Policy
Village Voice
3/07/2008
This article reviews the effect of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, enacted in 1973.
Among the toughest laws of their kind in the nation when they were passed 35 years ago, and even now after celebrated but humble reforms in 2004, the Rockefeller Drug Laws mandate severe prison sentences for anyone convicted of the possession and sale of relatively small amounts of narcotics, which included marijuana until 1979. Because the laws remove judicial discretion and mandate minimum sentences based on the amount of drug found on the person, and not his or her role in the transaction, advocates of repeal say that the Rockefeller Drug Laws brew a perfect social storm of ineffectiveness, racial basis, waste, and injustice.
America’s way of justice favors whites over blacks
Newsday.com
March 2, 2008
This article comments on the racial patterns of enforcement and imprisonment in the United States.
Another recent study revealed a stark contrast in the way blacks and whites are jailed for drug offenses, which account for a high percentage of prison populations. The Justice Policy Institute studied drug arrests in 198 of the largest U.S. counties, making up over half the nation’s population. All but two of these counties incarcerated blacks at a higher rate than whites. Suffolk County, where my wife and I raised three children, sent black drug offenders to prison at a rate some 36 times that of whites.
Such a shameful, national disparity in incarceration rates, according to the institute, occurred even with a pattern showing no appreciable difference between whites and blacks in illegal drug possession, use and sale. Some 8.5 percent of whites were found to use illicit drugs in ‘02, compared to 9.7 percent for blacks. Despite this similarity, African-Americans, the report found, were “admitted to prison for drug offenses [at] nearly 10 times the rate for whites.”