Last year, Pennsylvania passed SB 100 and HB 135, two major criminal justice reform bills. Now, following the largest one-year decline in inmate population since 1971, the Department of Corrections has announced that it will close two prisons, SCI Cresson in Cambria County and SCI Greensburg in Westmoreland County. Both facilities are among among Pennsylvania’s oldest and least secure prisons. (SCI Cresson was actually built to serve as as a tuberculosis sanitarium in 1913.) It is estimated that closing the two prisons will save Pennsylvania taxpayers about $23 million next year.

For the first time in the last ten years, the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections did not need to ask the Pennsylvania Legislature for more money.

That’s because the prison population growth has leveled off after 30 years of fairly consistent increases. The November month-end population in Pennsylvania prisons was 51,260. That’s compared to 51,467 a year ago. Stemming the tide of the prison population growth is an important step in the process of right-sizing the Pennsylvania criminal justice that gained steam in October with the passage of a justice reinvestment package in that state.

Pennsylvania has also been able to end the expensive practice of contracting for prison beds in other states to handle the overflow of prisoners. The state is now well-poised to implement the same types of reforms that Ohio, Texas, Georgia, and other states have used to cut prison costs and better protect public safety.

Earlier this month, Right on Crime posted about Pennsylvania’s Justice Reinvestment Working Group, which was launched with the support of Governor Tom Corbett. The group was created to suggest policies that would reduce corrections spending and reinvest those savings into measures to improve public safety.

Today, Governor Corbett signed into effect the second and final piece of the Working Group’s Reinvestment Legislation package. H.B. 135, which was passed unanimously in both chambers of the legislature, is the follow-up to H.B. 100. Where H.B. 100 included policy changes, H.B. 135 calls for the reinvestment of those savings into county-level law enforcement and incarceration alternatives.

H.B. 135 seeks to reduce both incarceration rates and recidivism. Specifically, it “will use $86 million to directly support many of the initiatives that include increased programming for release for non-violent offenders, expediting programming for short-time non-violent offenders and aggressively utilizing alternative sentencing for non-violent offenders and the increased use of treatment programs.”

Taken together, H.B. 100 and H.B. 135, will have a tremendous effect on Pennsylvania: first, on taxpayers, saving more than $250 million in five years; second, on communities, by creating a more efficient corrections system and making them safer; and finally, on offenders, by allowing for more efficient communication technology to increase parole hearing capacity.

For Governor Corbett, this is part of an ongoing effort to be “as smart as we are tough on crime.” He concludes that by “[w]orking together, we can deal with crime in a way that will redeem more offenders, appropriately incarcerates violent offenders and sexual predators, and keeps us all from being held prisoner to the growing costs of locking up the bad guys.”

Pennsylvania’s prison population has grown continually since 1982, in part due to the increasing number of non-violent offenders who are admitted and high failure rates among people under community supervision. These high re-incarceration rates may be due in part to inmates receiving ineffective programming.

In 2011, Governor Tom Corbett, Chief Justice Ronald Castille, the chairs of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, and other state leaders requested technical assistance from the Pew Center on the States and the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Assistance. Together, they launched Pennsylvania’s Justice Reinvestment Working Group.

This program was established under the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency.  It includes state cabinet secretaries, Republican and Democratic lawmakers, court officials, and other stakeholders in the criminal justice system. Extensive data from state agencies and organizations is compiled, analyzed, and presented to the group, which suggests policies aimed at reducing corrections spending. The savings are then reinvested into measures (e.g., electronic monitoring, problem-solving courts, reentry resources) to improve public safety.

This bipartisan project is part of a national project by the Council of State Governments Justice Center that has so far been adopted in seventeen states. CSG’s goal is to help states design “policies to manage the growth of the corrections system, improve the accountability and integration of resources concentrated in particular communities, and reinvest a portion of the savings generated from these efforts to make communities receiving the majority of people released from prison safer, stronger, and healthier”

Union County, Pennsylvania, will open a day reporting center for low-risk offenders by the end of the month.

In 2010, Union County spent $850,000 housing jail inmates in other locations because its own jail was severely overcrowded. County officials began to search for a more effective and cost-efficient way to manage its jail and realized there was a sizable portion of low-risk non-violent offenders who did not need secure confinement.

The County chose to follow the lead of 10 other municipalities in Pennsylvania, which have adopted day reporting for low-risk offenders, often those guilty of shoplifting or DUIs. Day reporting provides supervision for these offenders while connecting them with the resources necessary to desist from crime and obtain employment or substance abuse management.

It’s much a better option than busting the city budget and burdening taxpayers.