JPI Daily News Digest 6/11/12
Published: June 11, 2012
LA: Lousiana Legislature Takes Steps Toward Reducing Incarceration for Nonviolent Crimes (The Times-Picayune)
For more than two decades, blue-ribbon commissions have debated the framework of a penal system that has made Louisiana the world leader in incarceration. Lawyers, jurists, sheriffs and other experts have produced myriad analyses and policy recommendations, usually to no avail as tough-on-crime legislators, prosecutors and judges increased penalties and made parole harder to get.
IL: State Must Close Prisons as Need Decreases (Chicago Sun-Times)
Yet a little more than a week ago, the General Assembly stubbornly responded by passing a budget keeping the lights on in all eight juvenile prisons. At the same time they threw good money after bad on youth prisons, legislators approved serious cuts to nearly every social service program and other cuts that will be felt by the disadvantaged throughout the state.
MI: Lockup Gets Spared Budget Cuts (Livingston Daily)
A proposal to close the Maxey Training School in Green Oak Township died when the state approved its budget, keeping Michigan's highest-security juvenile center operational — for at least another year. The proposal would have closed the state's two other juvenile centers in Escanaba and Grayling as well, and it sought to place juveniles in privately run facilities.
IL: Illinois Advances Bill to Encourage Prisoner Rehabilitation (Lincoln Courier)
Illinois lawmakers are turning to a long-used but now politically risky idea of early release for prison inmates to make a dent in a severely overcrowded correctional system.
Posted in Criminal Justice News