Yost objects to prison-diversion program
Ohio Auditor Dave Yost is raising concerns about a budget proposal to divert thousands of low-level offenders from the state prison system.
The program might keep out some offenders who ought to be in prison, Yost said Thursday in a letter to House Finance Committee Chairman Ryan Smith, R-Bidwell.
Yost was objecting to the Targeted Community Alternatives to Prison program, which enjoys the support of the House Republican leadership, Gov. John Kasich and some progressive activists. It would divert 3,400 nonviolent, fifth-degree felons from state prisons into county jails and treatment programs over two years.
Offenders who have committed violent or sex offenses would be ineligible.
The state would pay counties about a third of what it costs to house someone in state prison. Eight counties have been participating in a pilot program since October, and Gary Mohr, director of the Ohio Department of Correction and Rehabilitation, said more are asking to participate.
In addition to saving money, the program is intended to provide local governments with resources to keep low-level offenders out of the prison system, he said.
Mohr said Ohio prisons are overcrowded. The most common cause of prison commitments is drug possession, so it makes sense to try to get low-level offenders into services in their communities instead of putting them in prison “with people who are going to be here for a long time,” Mohr said.
Yost, however, said some serious offenses might slip through the cracks if the program takes effect. Money laundering in support of terrorism, serial forgery and impaired driving that injures children are potentially nonviolent, non-sexual fifth-degree felonies, Yost said in his letter to Smith.
“At the very least, a judge hearing such a case ought to have the discretion to impose a prison sentence for such a violation,” Yost’s letter said.
In a prison system housing 50,200 inmates, only 19 were committed in 2016 on fifthdegree forgery convictions, and just three were on fifthdegree child-endangerment convictions, according to department statistics. No one is incarcerated on a fifth-degree conviction for laundering money for terrorists.
In an interview Friday, Yost said that maybe not every felony that is on the books should be there.
“There may well be some (fifth-degree) felonies that shouldn’t be felonies,” he said. “But if an offense is a felony on the books, you ought to be able to go to prison for it.”
John Murphy, executive director of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association, agreed.
“If we’re going to make these things felonies, we can’t take away the power of the court to deal with them,” he said.
Yost and Murphy said that if Kasich and legislators believe that certain crimes should not result in prison time, they should reclassify them as misdemeanors.
“Maybe we ought to eliminate ‘felony fives’ altogether,” said Yost, a former Delaware County prosecutor. “Maybe if (a crime) is serious enough, it ought to be a ‘felony four.’”
House GOP spokesman Brad Miller said such reclassifications might be warranted, but they’re a “deep dive” and would require a lot of time and resources.
Meanwhile, the TCAP program is an attempt to deal more effectively with the state’s opiate crisis and close a widening budget gap, Miller said.
Mohr said he has no problem with reclassifying certain offenses as misdemeanors. He said Ohio is one of just seven states allowing prison sentences of less than one year. That might help to explain why the state’s prison population hasn’t fallen over the past decade, as it has in some other states.
However, Mohr said, he has no power to change the law, and the TCAP program is showing promise.
“We have an opportunity to reduce this massive resource allocation,” he said.
Yost is running for attorney general. He denied that he used his office to run for another office when he officially objected as state auditor to the prison-alternatives program.
“I’m raising these issues because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “That’s what I do every day.”