Maryland looking at prison sentencing reform

The Maryland General Assembly is moving ahead on a bill that would let the state explore prison sentencing reform and reduce recidivism among former inmates.

The measure would create a Justice Reinvestment Coordinating Council, bringing a data-driven approach to improve public safety while reducing corrections spending.

The savings then would be reinvested in strategies to decrease crime and tackle recidivism.

The council would include legislators, law-enforcement and correctional officials, Maryland’s attorney general and other experts.

Former Washington County state senator Christopher B. Shank, who now heads the Governor’s Office of Crime Control and Prevention, said the measure directs his office to establish the council.

“This is a process that 26 other states have recently initiated,” Shank said. “Who is currently sitting in our correctional facilities, what are the drivers to our correctional population?”

Maryland currently has a recidivism rate of about 40 percent.

“That means 40 percent of people who leave our prison system are back again in three years,” Shank said. “To me, when the state is spending approximately $38,000 a year to incarcerate somebody, and within three years 40 percent are back, that tells me that we've got to do a better job working on re-entry, working on evidence based policies ... that will reduce recidivism and enable us to look at our criminal population and do more with community corrections so that when people are out, we are monitoring them appropriately.”

One example is releasing someone who has a drug problem who subsequently is unable to get treatment, Shank said. The chances of that person going back to prison are high, he said.

Among the states using such a data-driven approach is Pennsylvania, where new sentencing guidelines and expansion of recidivism-reduction programs are projected to reduce the state’s prison population by 1,200 inmates and result in gross savings of $139 million by 2018, according to a document from the GOCAP office.

“This isn’t about taking money out of the corrections budget. This isn’t about reinvesting those dollars and making sure that how we spend the state’s correction dollars ... part of that is looking what the populations are that we are serving,” Shank said.

There are three state prisons near Hagerstown — Maryland Correctional Training Center, Maryland Correctional Institution and Roxbury Correctional Institution.

Recent report

Maryland’s initiative comes at a time when a recent report by two nonprofits spotlights the impact incarceration has on communities.

The report by the Justice Policy Institute and the Prison Policy Initiative, two nonprofits that work in the area of justice reform, is an effort to “help state policymakers and residents make more informed choices on better ways to invest taxpayer resources in more effective public safety strategies,” according to the executive summary of the report.

The report concludes that eight areas in the state have incarceration rates higher than the state average. Hagerstown is one of them, with a rate more than double the state average.

“A current public health crisis related to heroin use and the availability of treatment lead the list of challenges likely contributing to higher incarceration rates in cities and towns across the state of Maryland,” the report said.

Jason Ziedenberg, director of research and policy for the Justice Policy Institute, said Maryland so far has not been on “the cusp of bipartisan sentencing reform.”

The data, which came from the Maryland Department of Planning, could be the starting point for communities to delve deeper into how crime, public health and other social indicators are affecting such communities, he said.

Some indicators in the report suggest that communities with higher incarceration rates also face challenges in the areas of employment, education, addiction and health.

Shank said his office has met with the Justice Policy Institute to go over the data.

“I think it’s a very useful way to conceptualize this issue, and they are making certain conclusions about the Hagerstown area, and it's something when I was a senator, we knew,” Shank said. “We have talked to the Department of Public Safety about the data and Justice Policy. I think we would like to sit down with them a little bit more and again tease out the data. I think there are some issues about how it's reported by ZIP code versus an actual jurisdiction, that is something we will continue to work on.”

Ziedenberg said in an email the “source of information of where people lived before they were in prison comes from information collected by the state.”

“There is nothing to suggest that there are any significant issues related to this data related to intentional misreporting,” he said.

What’s the plan?

Del. Brett Wilson, a Republican who represents Hagerstown, said he wasn’t surprised by the report’s findings.

“We know we have a substantial per-capita prison problem, and this just confirms what we are talking about," Wilson said. "The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

He said he would like to have more details about people listed as being from Hagerstown, how many really are from the city and how many are transients that came to the city and are arrested.

Wilson, who recently was appointed to Gov. Larry Hogan’s task force to tackle heroin addiction, said one issue is the city’s heroin problem.

“We’ve gotten so much more crime related to people’s drug addictions that we need to find a way to take out the addiction problem. I think when we do that, we will reduce crime,” said Wilson, who works as an assistant state’s attorney in Washington County.

“As we address the drug problem, we should see a reduction in crime also. This year we are studying it ... next year, we hope to implement whatever we can to try and take care of it,” Wilson said.

He said the Justice Reinvestment Council being proposed is an important first step.

It would take money and “put it into programs that can help inmates that are then released through the natural process of incarceration and parole, and perhaps we can reduce the recidivism,” Wilson said.