The Associated Press
TRENTON, N.J. (AP) -- New Jersey has joined other cash-strapped states in quietly taking steps to trim its prison population to save money.
Dozens of states are looking to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences, relax parole laws and divert some drug offenders into treatment programs.
New Jersey’s efforts are not as ambitious as other states, but many policymakers agree the state, which faces a potential $4 billion budget shortfall next year, cannot afford the status quo.
“We can no longer afford our criminal justice system,” Assemblywoman Mary Previte, D-Camden, told The Record of Bergen County.
Since New Jersey overhauled its criminal code in 1979, the state has steadily adopted longer criminal sentences.
Mandatory minimum sentences came in the 1980s. The 1990s brought restrictive sentences such as the “three-strikes” law, which imposes life prison sentences for those convicted of three or more violent crimes.
The state’s prison, parole and juvenile justice programs cost more than $1.2 billion annually today, up from $442 million in 1985.
State Corrections Commissioner Devon Brown has pushed for “good time” credits for well-behaved prisoners. The credits would be available to about 40 percent of the state’s 23,000 inmates and could reduce the average two-year prison sentence by 45 days.
The Legislature is considering bills that would create commissions to re-examine the state’s sentencing laws and study prison overcrowding.
The state Parole Board recently passed a regulation discouraging its officers from automatically sending parolees back to prison for minor violations, such as failing a drug test or violating curfew.
Politicians acknowledge such moves are risky for them.
“You don’t want the opposition to turn the finger on you and say you’re soft on crime,” said Assemblyman Peter Barnes Jr., D-Middlesex. “It’s one of the big reasons people are opposed to these measures.”
Brown, the corrections commissioner, contends get-tough-on-crime policies have disproportionately affected minorities. About 81 percent of New Jersey’s inmates are black or Hispanic, according to a recent study by the Justice Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
“With these figures in mind, there are those who with some degree of justification have proclaimed our prisons as being American’s new plantations.” Brown told a Hispanic organization last month. “Not since slavery has our country promoted policies which have visited such enormous economic and human calamity on the black community.”