Shrink Prisons, Save Money
With tax revenues drying up, the hangover from America’s 30-year prison binge is finally taking hold. Mandatory minimums, three strikes, truth in sentencing, zero tolerance—these slogans helped politicians win elections, but they also created punitive entitlement programs that locked governments into massive longterm expenditures, often with negligible benefits to public safety. As this New York Times editorial points out, a number of cash-strapped states are, at long last, looking to their prison bureaucracies for savings, not simply, one hopes, by slashing programming, but by designing evidence-based early-release procedures that can shrink the prison population and mitigate the collateral damage of mass imprisonment without serious crime risk.
