Early Release Is an Easy Target

by Matt Kelley

categories: alternatives to incarceration, parole / probation, prison conditions, prisoner reentry, sentencing

Published September 17, 2009 @ 06:38AM PT

Colorado is the newest battleground for the predictable and counterproductive early-release argument.

Gov. Bill Ritter has proposed releasing some prisoners six months before their sentences expire - and ending parole earlier than usual in some cases - to save the state nearly $20 million a year. Some of the savings would be used to improve post-release services, like housing and job assistance, and to transition the state toward lower-cost parolee monitoring using GPS. It's a balanced, reasonable and forward-looking plan. And the state attorney general hates it.

"I am concerned that the acceleration of mandatory parole for offenders who have not earned discretionary release will seriously compromise public safety,” AG John Suthers told the Denver Daily News.

The public discourse on crime and punishment has come a long way in recent years, but Suthers' knee-jerk fear of letting out the bad guys, who are apparently going to start killing immediately, shows us that we're not there yet. What Suthers surely realizes is that it's much more dangerous to keep someone locked up for six extra months and then push them out with the shirt on their back than to release them now but spend the savings on transition assistance. His comments are pure politics, and they don't help.

Of course early release programs should be focused on prisoners who have shown a willingness to succeed after prison. People convicted of minor crimes should be removed from the parole rolls so officers can focus on higher-risk parolees. I hope reform eventually goes even further than this, but we have so many people in prison who shouldn't be there, we should focus on them first.

This debate is playing out in states across the country: California, Kentucky, Washington and others are addressing the addiction to imprisonment in an effort to save cash. Time Magazine recently explored the question at the heart of the matter: does early release affect the crime rate?

The academic work on the subject is thin, Time found, and the smart-on-crime vs. tough-on-crime debate plays out across the spectrum when this question is raised. But as I mentioned above, early-release could actually reduce crime. From Time:

"There are two effects of incarceration," says criminologist Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa. "One is specific deterrence — you go to prison, and you say, 'Holy s___, I don't want to go through that again.' That is the crime-reducing component of prison. But the other effect of incarceration is criminalization. You have connection with gangs. You have diminished opportunities after you get out — and therefore you have some higher chance of returning to crime. Lots of researchers have tried to sort out the strength of these two effects, without much success. With early release, then, the question becomes, Does it make them more criminal because they think, 'I got away with it,' or less criminal because they think, 'The system has been really nice to me'? No one knows the answer."

Until we find that answer, the lines will be drawn: either we replace sprawling prisons with education and services aimed at avoiding prison or we keep going with the throw-away-the-key policies that have served us so well for so long. You know where I stand.

Via Think Outside the Cage

Photo by Chiara Marra