Budget includes plan to reduce prison population

Ohio budget debates are as about much policy — ideas — as they are about pelf. One of the better policy ideas in Ohio’s proposed 2017-19 budget, an idea ardently backed by Republican Gov. John Kasich’s administration, could reduce the number of low-level, nonviolent offenders in state prisons.

The plan, skippered by Rehabilitation and Correction Director Gary Mohr, a member of Kasich’s Cabinet, is called T-CAP (“Targeting Community Alternatives to Prison”).

Some local government lobbies, for a range of reasons, are leery of the T-CAP plan. But a budget rewrite that House Republicans unveiled last week retained the budget bill’s T-CAP provisions. And the House seems likely to pass the two-year budget (House Bill 49) this week, with T-CAP included.

According to the Rehabilitation and Correction Department, T-CAP is aimed at nonviolent fifth-degree felons sentenced to a year or less “for nonviolent, nonsex, nonmandatory Felony 5 … offenses … whose criminal history does not include any prior violent felony or sex offense.” The budget would make such offenders (an estimated 3,400 a year) ineligible for state prisons. Instead, they’d be jailed or supervised locally. (In 2016, about 46 percent of such offenders had been found guilty of drug possession.)

The Legislative Service Commission says T-CAP could cut state spending on incarceration “by an unspecified amount that may reach into tens of millions of dollars annually.” Meanwhile, according to Rehabilitation and Correction, state aid for community correction programs would rise $19 million in the year that’ll begin July 1, then by $39 million the year after that, to provide T-CAP grants to localities.

Among those raising questions about T-CAP are the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association and the County Commissioners Association of Ohio. The prosecutors association, according to executive director John Murphy, opposes the proposal because it would limit judges’ sentencing options. The County Commissioners’ Association, while it believes T-CAP “has merit as a best practice,” doesn’t support it for several reasons, summarized as costs (to counties), counties’ readiness, and the state’s proposed timeline. “But primarily,” an association committee said in a March statement of concerns, T-CAP “seeks to keep Ohio’s prison population down at the expense of the counties.”

This month, Ohio’s state prisons held 50,160 inmates (just 2.2 percent fewer than November 2008’s all-time peak, 51,273). And the average annual cost per inmate to Ohio taxpayers is $24,763. No question, the Kasich administration has tried to downstream various costs to localities while pruning local government aid.

T-CAP’s implementation timeline might require tweaking, state T-CAP subsidies boosted, judges left with some flexibility in sentencing, and some Felony 5 crimes downgraded as misdemeanors. But sending a nonviolent Ohio drug offender to the jug is like using a sledgehammer to putt a golf ball.

Meanwhile: The search for accomplishment or even meaning in Donald Trump’s first 100 days is … interesting … given that the “Hundred Days” yardstick originated with Franklin Roosevelt.

Until 1937, a president’s term began on March 4. From FDR’s March 4, 1933, inauguration to mid-June 1933 “was the Hundred Days,” historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote, “and in this period Franklin Roosevelt sent 15 messages to Congress, guided 15 major laws to enactment, delivered 10 speeches, held press conferences and Cabinet meetings twice a week, conducted talks with foreign heads of state, sponsored an international conference, made all the major decisions in domestic and foreign policy, and never displayed fright or panic and rarely even bad temper.”

Even if Twitter existed in the ‘30s, FDR, unlike Trump, likely wouldn’t have tweeted: Roosevelt actually got things done. And they spoke for themselves.