VICTORY LAP

Positive criminal justice trends are sustainable, will continue, they say

Massachusetts officials laud Malloy for the Hartford Line.

Mike Lawlor, outgoing Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s point man on crime, followed Malloy’s final recap of criminal justice reforms on Thursday with an emotional summary of his own, wondering aloud why more people don’t boast about marked drops in prison population, arrests, and violent crime.

Lawlor, the former prosecutor and longtime legislator, knows the answer, of course. The opioid epidemic, periodic spikes in juvenile crime, truancy rates, and economic and racial disparity still give cops, court and criminal justice officials, educators and advocates plenty to be concerned about.

But Malloy, saying Connecticut is safer and more supportive to young people than it has been in generations, and Lawlor, who again flashed his charts with all the downward arrows, used the occasion of the last criminal justice policy commission meeting of their careers to proclaim that the positive trends are sustainable and will create time and money to address other problems.

Malloy said he believes that Gov.-elect Ned Lamont will continue policies that ushered in wider juvenile court protections, expanded gun control, reduced penalties

for some drug and nonviolent offenses, expedited parole, eliminated cash bail for misdemeanor offenses in most cases, began data collection on racial profiling and Taser use, and made preparation for release the key focus of the prison system.

He said these initiatives took guts on his part and predicted they would take root across the country.

Malloy said he was ex- tremely proud of a dramatic reduction in suspensions, expulsions and arrests in school, ending what he said was “the high school-toprison pipeline.”

“Now urban schools are driving an increase in graduation rates,” Malloy said.

He said that new counseling programs that recognize post-traumatic stress in young people, coupled with the expansion of juvenile-court protection to 18-year-olds, has helped keep a generation of at-risk youth out of the criminal justice system.

Arrests of 10- to 17-year- olds have dropped 63 percent since 2008, and arrests of 18- to 20-year-olds are down 57 percent, Lawlor said.

“We used to have big prisons, and all they did was give people advanced degrees in criminal behavior,” Malloy said.

The prison population in the early spring of 2008, in the months after the Cheshire home invasion and murders, fell just shy of 20,000 inmates. Thursday, the state’s prison held just over 13,000 inmates, Lawlor said. He said an inmate count of 10,000 in two to four years was possible.

Meanwhile, reported violent crime is down 25 percent since 2009, and the criminal court caseload is down 40 percent, Lawlor said.

Thursday’s commission meeting at the Legislative Office Building was also the last for Scott Semple, the retiring correction commissioner and perhaps Malloy and Lawlor’s closest partner in the implementation of reforms.

Lawlor mentioned that Semple had lost his only son to illness and that he had dedicated the rest of his public-safety career to the memory of his boy.

“If any anyone ever kept a promise, Scott, it was you,” said Lawlor, his voice choking.

Lawlor and Semple did sound an alarm, though, saying inmates on special parole, having received years of community supervision on top of their prison sentences, account for half of the paroled population and are filling halfway house beds meant for regular parolees, who have a much shorter period of supervision to complete. Semple said the logjam is delay- ing parole hearings and the potential release of 900 parole-eligible inmates. Imprisonment costs taxpayers twice as much as community supervision, Semple said.

Lawlor said special parole, first designed for violent offenders who wouldn’t qualify for the usual array of re-entry programs, has been used too frequently by judges.

Judge Patrick Carroll, the chief court administrator, said he would immediately reaffirm with all state judges the original intent of special parole and monitor its use.