On Tuesday and Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee,
chaired by Sen. Lisa Baker, R-Luzerne, will hold a public hearing on
Pennsylvania’s parole and probation systems, which supervise offenders and
newly released prisoners living in their communities.
The committee will hear from more than a dozen stakeholders
in the probation and parole debate, including county district attorneys,
criminal defense lawyers, and advocacy groups like the American Civil Liberties
Union, and the Reform Alliance, which is chaired by Philadelphia rapper and
probation and parole reform advocate Meek Mill.
Representatives from state Department of Corrections, the
Office of the Victim Advocate, and the Sentencing Commission will also offer
testimony.
“What you’ll see are people on all different sides of the
issue,” said Mike Cortez, a top aide to Baker and the Judiciary Committee.
Cortez acknowledged it’s an unusual time to devote so much
attention to a single policy matter, given that leaders in the House and Senate
are scrambling to finish Pennsylvania’s 2019-20 budget by the end of June.
But he also said the Judiciary Committee is eager to hear
solutions to fix Pennsylvania’s expensive and punitive supervision programs.
“It’s incredibly important,” Cortez said. “The hearing will
be a sounding board to figure out what we can do, what we can’t do, and if
there are ways we can move bills forward.”
Probation and parole laws are meant to cut costs and reduce
prison populations. But a newly released report suggests the opposite is true
in many states.
Pennsylvania spent $100 million to arrest and incarcerate
people who committed technical violations of parole — infractions like missing
a meeting with a probation officer or failing a drug test — according to a report from
the Council on State Governments, a non-partisan public policy research
institute.
The state spends an additional $200 million incarcerating
people who commit new crimes while on probation or parole.
As a result, more than half of the people sent to prison in
Pennsylvania are brought in because of a technical violation of parole. Some
may not stay for long, but on a given day, 7,000 of the state’s inmates are
incarcerated for parole violations.
The high social and economic costs of probation and parole
have put the programs in the crosshairs of criminal justice reformers in the
state Senate, which recently passed a package of bills aimed at cutting
corrections costs and reinvesting savings in public safety initiatives.
A comprehensive probation and parole reform bill could be
next on their agenda, Cortez said.
The Judiciary Committee will also discuss a bill from Sens.
Camera Bartolotta, R-Washington , and Sen. Anthony Williams, D-Philadelphia, that
would minimize technical violations and cap probation terms.
Pennsylvania is one of only eight states that puts no limit
on how long someone can serve probation.
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