INDIANAPOLIS — EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second in three-day series examining the issue of minor felony convictions related to Indiana prison overcrowding, offender recidivism and sentencing fairness.
At first glance, the rural Indiana counties of Huntington and Martin look like they’d have much in common. Both are populated with small towns that pride themselves on safe streets and some of lowest crime rates in the state.
But, for law-breakers, the difference between the two counties is stark.
According to numbers released by the Indiana Department of Correction this summer, the odds of getting prison time for committing the most common crimes are higher in Huntington County than anywhere else in the state. The odds in Martin County: near zero.
The same numbers — taken from a 12-month count of DOC inmates convicted of the lowest level felony offenses — shows a similar disparity in Indiana urban counties with high crimes rates.
In the course of a year — from August 2010 to July 2011 — Marion County, home to nearly a million people, sent 100 times more Class D felons into the DOC than Lake County, which is half its size. Indiana law gives counties sentencing options for Class D felons, ranging from probation to prison time. But the DOC numbers show a patchwork quilt of incarceration across the state, suggesting a wide variation in how different counties treat the same offenses.
It’s a geographic disparity with impact. If you’re caught committing one of the 150-plus offenses categorized as a Class D felony, if and where you do the time may depend on where you did the crime.
Advocates for sentencing reform in Indiana argue those numbers need to be delved into much deeper. They say the only way to cut state prison costs is to get more county officials to see the state Department of Correction as Martin County Prosecutor Mike Steiner does: a last resort for low-level offenders.
“My personal belief,” said Steiner, “is that going to the Department of Correction is like going to grad school for crime.”
There are plenty of prosecutors and judges who’d disagree, including Huntington County Superior Court Judge Jeff Heffelfinger.
“We send people to prison because they belong there,” he said. “It’s what our communities expect us to do.”
Dollars … and sense
The numbers issue is driven by more than just philosophical differences over crime and punishment.
It’s also about money.
The sentencing trends for Class D offenders are being studied by a group of state-funded researchers, commissioned to find out why Indiana prisons saw a 41 percent jump in their numbers between 2000 to 2009. That increase came with an accompanying $120 million rise in costs — a figure that alarmed Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. When he pushed for sweeping sentencing reform during the 2011 legislative session, he argued there was a need to cut prison costs and said there were too many low-risk, low-level offenders taking up expensive bed space needed for the state’s more dangerous criminals.
Keep up the numbers, he warned, and the state would be forced to spend scarce dollars building more prisons.
The sentencing reform bill died; and to the surprise of some, Daniels announced in December that he’d taken sentencing reform off his legislative priority list for the 2012 session. Daniels said there was a lack of legislative consensus to get anything significant done. He still thinks the state’s prison costs are worrisome, but he’s also echoes Steiner’s point of view: Prisons are where petty offenders go for an apprenticeship in crime.
Daniels still believes the findings of a 2010 Pew Center on the States report of Indiana’s prison problems. The authors said the quickest way to counter the state’s prison population was to send the lowest-level offenders back to their home counties and into community-based programs proven to be effective in reducing offender return rates.
“It’s first about reducing recidivism and then about saving state dollars,” the governor said at an early December news conference. “It’s in that order.”
Before he’d given up on reviving sentencing reform in 2012, Daniels backed a proposal that would have had direct impact on dollars to the counties.
Carved out of last year’s sentencing reform legislation, it would have created an incentive program that to funnel more state dollars to counties that send fewer Class D felons to the DOC. And it would have cut state funding to counties that send more.
That proposal is on hold, after it failed to gain enough support from the legislative Criminal Code Commission, which spent the summer looking into ways to reduce the number of low-level felons in Indiana prisons.
Skeptics included Larry Landis, head of the Indiana Public Defenders Council, who worried about its unintended consequences. “It may just mean more people will be charged with a higher-level felony,” Landis said. “It doesn’t solve the problem of there being too many people in prison.”
Data could be turnkey
There’s plenty of speculation as to why there are so many Class D felons in Indiana prisons and why they’re coming from where they do.
The DOC numbers released in August showed that 70 percent of Class D felons in the DOC came from 16 of Indiana’s 92 counties.
The numbers also show that of the top 10 counties with the highest per capita rates of Class D felons in the DOC, none are home to the state’s biggest cities, which have the state’s highest crime rates.
Demographics don’t seem to matter, either. Hamilton County, the state’s most affluent with one of the lowest crimes rates, sent three times as many Class D felons into the DOC as Lake County, which is twice its size, much poorer in income and has a crime rate 20 times higher. Both counties have community-based corrections programs, though Lake County’s is much larger.
— Maureen Hayden is Statehouse bureau chief for CNHI Indiana newspapers. She can be reached at maureen.hayden@indianamediagroup.com.
