“How to Cut the Prison Population, Save Money and Make Us Safer”

The title of this post is the headline of this New York Times opinion piece authored by German Lopez.  Here is how it starts and ends:

American prisons are fast becoming the world’s worst nursing homes, increasingly filled with aging criminals who can barely walk, let alone commit another crime.  The idea that we should lock up people for life, even through old age, is often framed as being tough on crime. In reality, it gives years, if not decades, of shelter, food and health care to convicted criminals and redirects money from programs we know do a better job of protecting the public.

Older people are much less likely to commit crime than the young.  They are also much more expensive to lock up. Federal prisons with the largest share of older prisoners spend five times as much per person on medical care and 14 times as much on medications as other facilities, according to the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit advocacy group.

States and counties, which oversee a vast majority of people in prison, cannot run deficits for long or print money, as the federal government can.  Every buck that pays for one thing means a dollar less for another.  Funds spent on locking up an old inmate could have helped pay for more police officers or other anti-crime initiatives or schools or roads or any of the myriad other demands on local governments.

I have reported on criminal justice issues for more than a decade.  If I have learned anything, it’s that crime policy is all about trade-offs, more so than in most other areas.  Releasing more old people from prison, however, is close to a free lunch. Not only could it save money, but if the savings are wisely reinvested, it also could improve public safety….

Lawmakers should address this problem with available policies: Governors should issue pardons for older inmates. Parole boards should put more weight on age.  Officials should more aggressively use compassionate release laws that on a limited basis let out inmates who are ill.  But lawmakers should go further.  They should enact laws that require courts to revisit sentences after, say, 20 years.  They should grant inmates the presumption of parole in more cases, meaning a parole board would keep a person locked up only with good reason.  Broader reform should reduce the use of longer sentences in general.

Some caution is warranted.  People deemed dangerous — the criminal justice system has ways of gauging that risk — should not be let out.  Policies might exclude certain kinds of crimes. 

With the savings from releases, lawmakers could pay for more effective approaches to public safety.  Experts often say the United States is overincarcerated and underpoliced, particularly for violent crime. Police departments across the country have reported serious staffing shortages for years, and we know that having fewer officers around leads to more crime. These shortages are one reason nearly half of America’s murderers now get away with it.

You don’t have to mourn an older killer’s lifelong suffering in prison to think reform is a good idea. You can just think, as I do, that the criminal justice system should protect Americans as efficiently and effectively as possible. Paying for the housing, food and health care of someone unlikely to commit a crime should not make the cut.