Because 90% of all prisoners in the United States are in state facilities, the work that states are doing to reduce their prison populations is crucial. Attempting to end mass incarceration necessitates realizing this is a situation requiring not one national solution, but fifty state solutions. Below are current state solutions that could be effectively modeled by other states for meaningful reform.
“Despite Florida’s low crime rates and despite prison admissions declining for nine of the last 10 years, Florida’s prison and jails budgets are higher than ever. Due to long sentences, the inmate population has stayed stubbornly near its all-time high, and this past year, the state budget gave $2.3 billion for the Department of Corrections, and even that wasn’t enough — the agency hit a $79 million deficit.“
Florida Times-Union
October 19, 2018
Read More"Even as crime rates and prison admissions have fallen over the past decade, ever-lengthening criminal sentences have left Florida prisons full of inmates and in need of a record $2.4 billion — a budget-busting challenge for the state’s next governor to resolve. How he or she would do so falls on a single but complex question: Does Florida’s harsh penal system need reform?"
Florida Times Union
August 17, 2018
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