(C) Daily Montanan This story was originally published by Daily Montanan and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . As Montana considers more prison funding, experts say state is moving in the wrong direction – Daily Montanan [1] ['Darrell Ehrlick', 'More From Author', '- April'] Date: 2023-04-25 Montana lawmakers, led by a Republican supermajority, are looking to get tough on crime. So much so that Sen. Barry Usher, R-Billings, is sponsoring legislation that makes theft of property worth $1,500 or more an offense punishable by as many as 10 years in prison and fine of as much as $50,000. Senate Bill 95 also increases penalties of theft of less than $1,500, increasing local jail time. That has led the legislature to revive the concept of sending prisoners out of state to Arizona to a private facility run by contractor CoreCivic, and increase funding for prisoners — whether to the state or a private contractor — by millions. The two concepts are related because room in Montana’s jail and prisons is already at or above capacity. Previously this session, lawmakers scotched the idea of sending prisoners to Arizona after lawmakers changed laws to allow pre-release of prisoners sooner and added support for those programs. Yet that idea seemed short-lived because as they were relaxing laws in one area, they were increasing penalties in another. The state estimates that Montana will imprison at least 200 more people if SB 95, which focuses on property theft, passes — a capacity that doesn’t exist in the chronically understaffed prison in Deer Lodge. However, new reporting by Montana Women Vote, Open Aid Alliance and the Sentencing Project shows that proposals like SB 95 may be contributing to the chronic overcrowding of prisons and jails. Nationwide, data show the number of violent crimes decreasing per capita while the number of people being incarcerated per capita continues to climb. Nicole D. Porter, the senior director of advocacy for The Sentencing Project, said those numbers are easy to dissect: More social service programs have helped reduce poverty and drug dependency, while more prisoners are spending longer incarcerated, driving up the numbers with laws that require “mandatory minimums” or a set amount of time a prisoner must serve. She also presented data that shows that longer prison sentences don’t actually work as a deterrent, just as the death penalty hasn’t stopped homicide. Porter said the upward trend in prison populations started in 1973 and peaked in 2009 with 1.5 million prisoners in the U.S. Meanwhile, violent crime has dropped nationally, falling from 575 incidents per 100,000 people to 380 in 2020, the latest data available. While other countries saw an upward trend in prisoners in the 1970s and 1980s, European countries started other prison diversion measures, including more access to early childhood education, more help with job and education training, as well as stable housing for prisoners after they completed shorter sentences. Many of those programs involved heavy use of community service and volunteer work as well as transforming parole and probation officers into more of a caseworker, Porter said. “If our rate of decline were just 1% per year, it would take us 75 years to return to the incarceration rates of the 1980s,” Porter said. “This is misplaced priorities that have failed our communities.” She pointed out women have experienced a 525% increase in prison numbers since the 1980s, largely affecting women of color. And, the number of prisoners serving a life sentence is now greater than the total population of inmates in 1970. “Life imprisonment is a driver of high incarceration rates,” she said. “And many have aged into disability.” Crime and drugs Laurel Hesse, the director of communications and advocacy for Open Aid Alliance, said that part of the challenge is that prisons and jails started swelling with more drug laws. For example, from 1980 to 2017, the number of people convicted of drug-related crimes increased 559%. She pointed out that 65% of the inmates at the Montana State Prison fit a diagnosis of substance abuse disorder. “If long sentences were effective, you would think that the number of people incarcerated would drop,” she said. Even measures like House Bill 791, which passed the Legislature last week, increased mandatory minimums for fentanyl convictions, bumping sentences from 25 to 40 years in prison. “There is no link between harsh sentences and drug reduction,” Hesse said. “And it limits judicial discretion to give treatment while perpetuating the myth that you can scare residents into not using drugs.” She also pointed out that Montana has one of the largest racial disparities in prison populations, especially in drug convictions. While Native Americans make up 7% of the population in Montana, they are incarcerated at a 17% clip and arrested at a 19% rate. Nicole Gomez, the justice initiative director for Montana Women Vote, said this year’s legislature has done a good job of making drug problems in the state sound like an imported business. “(The lawmakers) are arguing that the people that are using drugs and bringing them in are not us or they’re from south of the border,” she said. However, prosecution statistics show that the problem is happening in many Montana communities and related to poverty and substance abuse. “Harsher sentencing has never been shown to result in decreased crime,” Gomez said. “They just result in more and more people in prison.” Furthermore, she said that the lack of support systems for prisoners who get out almost guarantees failure because they contribute to a cycle of poverty because of poor job prospects and expensive housing. “It’s almost impossible for them to succeed. It’s almost guaranteed they’ll fail,” Gomez said. [END] --- [1] Url: https://dailymontanan.com/2023/04/25/as-montana-considers-more-prison-funding-experts-say-state-is-moving-in-the-wrong-direction/ Published and (C) by Daily Montanan Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/montanan/