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?
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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.