People who commit the most violent of crimes in Indiana will be serving longer prison sentences. Fewer people who are convicted of low-level felonies will be sentenced to prison.
And counties will see more state funding to help rehabilitate their non-violent offenders, who until recently would’ve been serving years within the Indiana Department of Correction.
On July 1 of last year, more than 200 new laws were added to the Indiana Criminal Code. And after six years of Statehouse proposals, study committees and debate, economics finally caught up with the push by politicians to get tough on crime.
A report from the Pew Center for the States in 2010 found Indiana’s state prison population had grown by 41 percent from 2000 to 2008. That was significantly higher than the 12 percent average for the nation as a whole in that same time period.
Why did our prison population grow so quickly? The Pew study put the blame on harsher sentencing and corrections policies over the past three decades.
To reverse the trend, then-Gov. Mitch Daniels and a number of Indiana lawmakers proposed reforms they said would create a more precise set of drug and theft sentencing laws that would give judges more options.
They proposed to strengthen community supervision by focusing resources on high-risk offenders and to reduce recidivism by increasing access to community-based substance abuse and mental health treatment.
Many of these proposals finally were adopted in 2014. But the reforms didn’t include funding to improve probation, parole and treatment programs on the county level.
Lawmakers addressed that oversight this past legislative session, providing $116 million for community corrections and increasing funding for mental health and addiction treatment by $30 million.