John J. Sloss

Not only does Arizona have an overcrowded prison system but Arizona is a national leader in incarcerations–primarily from non-violent offenses. Arizona incarcerates more people per 100,000 than any other western state. In fact, there is no state in the Northeast, Midwest, or Western United States that incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than Arizona.

According to the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, Arizona has seen a huge increase in its prison population. Since 1980, Arizona has increased the prison population by 347%. The number of people incarcerated per 100,000 residents increased from 160 in 1980 to 554 by 2008. Much of the increase in our prison population is due to Arizona incarcerating more individuals for non-violent offenses.

This incarceration rate of 554 inmates per 100,000 residents rate is higher than the average incarceration rate for the western states, which is 438 per 100,000, and the national average for states, which is 447 per 100,000. Only six southern states have a higher incarceration rate than Arizona. For comparison, some of the other western states incarceration rates are listed below:

Arizona 554

Nevada 509

California 471

Colorado 465

Oregon 369

New Mexico 313

Washington 273

Current Actions Are Costly:

We cannot afford to continue letting an overcrowded prison system grow. During the last twenty years we have seen the money spent by all fifty states to run their prison systems increase five fold, from approximately $10 billion a year to almost $50 billion a year. This does not take into account the money spent to build new facilities. Currently the average cost in the United States per inmate is almost $24,000 per year. It is easy to do the math to see that Arizona’s approximately 40,000 inmates in the state prison system alone costs the state almost a billion dollars annually.

Alternative Strategies:

With the economic problems we are now facing as a state and a nation, we need to prioritize our expenditures. We should concentrate the money we do spend on corrections to keep violent and dangerous inmates incarcerated and provide good supervision and treatment for those non-violent offenders who do not need to be incarcerated.

We should provide judges with more effective options than incarceration for sentencing. In many cases, these options are both more cost-effective and more productive in helping offenders turn around their lives. These options could include:

• home arrest,
• residential or out-patient mental health or substance abuse counseling programs,
• mandated educational/vocational programs,
• incarceration in jail and placed on work release, so individuals can continue to support their families, and
• shorter periods of incarceration in prison or jail.

Most of the people incarcerated do return at some point to society. However, if we do not better prepare them to function appropriately as a working member of the community, they return to their prior behaviors.

If I can be of assistance to you during these rapidly changing times, feel free to call. In addition to my experience with the Department of Corrections and as a member and chairman of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, I have over 20 years experience working with clients, their families, and attorneys developing mitigation proposals to be submitted to the Court. Ongoing consultation and support is also offered for clients and families prior to incarceration and during the transitional period.

John J. Sloss

602-329-5631

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Arizona, like many other states, currently has an overcrowded prison population. Recently, a panel of federal judges ordered the State of California to reduce its prison population by approximately 27% (a reduction of 40,000 out of 150,000 inmates).

The California legislature is now working on a bill to reduce the prison population. This bill also contains a section that will have inmates, who are released from prison and who have a history of violent offenses, on a much stricter level of supervision than those released for non-violent offenses. The new bill would preclude many of the individuals under supervision, who are currently being re-incarcerated for technical violations, from being returned to prison, unless they also commit a new offense.

Colorado prison authorities announced this month that they will release 6,400 inmates early, due to budgetary concerns and prison overcrowding. This is up from the original number of 3,400 that was originally announced.

Arizona is currently suffering from similar overcrowding problems at a time when the state is already suffering from a lack of income and is requiring state agencies to reduce their budgets. As reported in the March 2009 Phoenix Business Journal, Arizona’s prison population was projected to increase by 52% from 2005 to 2015. That is over twice the rate of increase in the state’s population during the same time. This means that Arizona would need to increase the number of prison beds by 20,000 just to handle the increase. This does not even account for the number of new beds needed to handle the current overcrowding. These conditions may lead to changes in Arizona similar to what is happening in other states.

If I can be of assistance to you during these rapidly changing times, feel free to call. In addition to my experience with the Department of Corrections and as a member and chairman of the Board of Pardons and Paroles, I have over 20 years experience working with clients, their families and attorneys developing mitigation proposals to be submitted to the Court. Ongoing consultation and support is also offered for clients and families prior to incarceration and during the transitional period.

John J. Sloss 602-329-5631

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Welcome to JJS Consulting’s Web Site. Our goal is to provide our readers with the most up-to-date standards and practices. This is our first blog entry.

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States throughout the nation, including Arizona have experienced a tremendous increase in prison population, as a result of adopting a “Truth in Sentencing” type criminal code. With this increase, due to budgetary restraints, we have seen a decrease in available programming within the prison systems. While punishment is one factor that should determine a sentence, Courts also need to take into account rehabilitation, restitution, and deterrence.

Many states are currently hurting due to the economic problems, we as a nation, are facing. One contributing factor to the financial hardships is due to the expanded prison systems. It is expensive both to build facilities and then run these facilities properly. Recently Federal judges ordered the State of California to release tens of thousands of inmates. California’s 33 prisons have become so overcrowded, according to the Court, they violate the constitutional rights of inmates by subjecting them to “cruel and unusual” punishment. Just over a third of the state’s 158,000 prisoners must be set free by 2012 to ensure that basic healthcare is provided to those who remain behind, the judges said.

The prison crisis is not limited to California. Michigan, where Detroit has America’s highest murder rate, will release 4,000 prisoners who have served their minimum sentences. New Jersey, Carolina and Vermont are putting drug-addicted offenders into treatment rather than prison. Louisiana, which has one of the highest incarceration rates in the developed world, is hoping to reform a system that spends more on prisons than on higher education. Other states’ prison systems, such as Arizona, are so overcrowded that they are placing inmates in contract prisons outside the boundaries of Arizona. In many cases these inmates no longer get visits from families due to the travel and hotel costs. This creates a hardship not only for the inmate’s family and the inmate; it also makes it more difficult for the inmate to be reintegrated back into society at the end of his or her sentence.

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