INDIANAPOLIS — Indiana prosecutors who opposed a failed criminal sentencing reform bill are getting some vindication: The prison data that drove the legislation is being re-examined.
In recent weeks, an Indiana Department of Correction consultant has been meeting privately with prosecutors who’d argued that a report that showed Indiana’s prison population was escalating with low-level offenders was flawed.
John Von Arx, a criminal justice consultant and former public safety policy director for Gov. Mitch Daniels, characterized his work for the IDOC as “peeling back the onion” to look closer at the data used to argue for legislation aimed at reducing the state’s prison population. He’s expected to give an update on his work Thursday to a legislative committee studying Indiana’s criminal sentencing polices.
State Sen. Richard Bray (R-Martinsville), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and an initial supporter of sentencing reform, said the numbers used to build a case for the reform legislation were “sloppy” and needed to be re-examined.
The “peeling back the onion” analogy was also used by state Rep. Ralph Foley, a sentencing reform advocate who pushed for a closer look at the disputed data as a way to get the derailed legislation back on track.
Foley, a Republican lawyer from Martinsville, said the data dispute had “bogged down” efforts to overhaul how Indiana treats crime and punishment. “We need to be talking about policy and not be arguing about the numbers behind the policy,” Foley said.
Floyd County Prosecutor Keith Henderson, a member of the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council who’d questioned the numbers, said he had confidence in Von Arx. “I think he’s committed to doing what he was hired by the DOC to do, which is to get the right numbers out.”
The numbers in question are critical. They were used by the Council of State Governments Justice Center and the Pew Center on the States to compile a report, released in January, that showed Indiana’s prison population had increased more rapidly than surrounding states over the past decade and was on track to keep escalating at an enormous cost to the state budget.
But prosecutors questioned why that report used prison population numbers from 2000 to 2008, which showed a rise in prisoners, but didn’t use numbers from 2009 and 2010, which showed a leveling off of the prison population — a trend that Henderson said would have undermined the argument for sentencing reform.
Prosecutors also questioned the report’s finding that about half of new prisoners in DOC facilities were people whose crimes fell into the least serious category, Class D felonies. Those numbers were used as basis for the sentencing reform bill that would have reduced penalties for low-level drug and property crimes and shifted those offenders out of state prisons and back into local jails and community corrections programs.
Henderson said those Class D felony numbers are misleading because they fail to account for why those offenders had been sent to prison. He said prosecutors and judges aren’t likely to send low-risk, first-time offenders with Class D felony charges to prison. “We need to look deeper into these numbers,” Henderson said.
That may require months of work since the DOC doesn’t keep the kind of detailed sentencing records on Class D felons that they do on offenders charged with more serious crimes. Von Arx said it may require digging into local court records.
Robert Coombs, a senior policy analyst at the Council on State Governments, said a review of the data used in the Council’s prison report may be helpful. “It’s totally appropriate to look into the numbers,” he said.
But he also said the dispute over the data shouldn’t undermine the report’s findings that Indiana has disproportionately harsh punishments for low-level drug and property crimes. “It doesn’t change the fundamental question of whether or not people committing low-level property and drug crimes are getting sanctions that don’t fit the crime,” Coombs said.
© 2024 Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc.