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.