Bench & Bar

JAN 2013

The Bench & Bar magazine is published to provide members of the KBA with information that will increase their knowledge of the law, improve the practice of law, and assist in improving the quality of legal services for the citizenry.

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CORRECTIONS Can a beast as multi-headed and relentless as Corrections be tamed? By Secretary J. Michael Brown I n Kentucky, we are proving that it can. Nearly five years ago, Kentucky led the nation in inmate population growth, which had surged 12 percent over the previous year, according to a 2008 report by the Pew Center on the States.1 At that time, more than 22,700 felons resided in 13 state prisons, three private prisons, county jails and halfway houses. Since then, we have explored in exhaustive detail how we got to that unwanted position, and we have taken bold steps to reverse the trend on what was nearing a half-billion dollar annual expense. At Gov. Steve Beshear's direction, I convened the Kentucky Criminal Justice Council,2 composed of a wide array of leaders and stakeholders in the criminal justice system. The group began a thorough review of prior reports and best practices to develop recommendations which were presented to the Governor in December 2008.3 Those recommendations became the foundation for a steady, continuous effort to wound, if not slay, the monster that our burgeoning prison population had become. Focusing on re-entry The vast majority of former inmates who return to prison do so for reasons other than having committed a new felony.4 They may have failed a drug test, for example, or otherwise violated a technical condition of their parole. Still, that revolving door creates a perilous strain on our entire criminal justice system. Better preparing inmates to re-enter their communities has critical social, fiscal and public safety impacts. Deterring individuals from going deeper into the criminal justice system is an essential first step in curbing the prison population and reigning in costs. To that end, we established the Governor's Re-Entry Task Force with a goal of lowering the recidivism rate by 50 percent over a five-year period. The task force meets regularly to develop initiatives that help former inmates re-enter society and reduce the likelihood that they will re-offend. In addition, the Department of Corrections has trained more than 1,000 staff on its new Level of Services/Case Management Inventory (LS/CMI) assessment tool, which helps determine an inmate's risk of re-offending. The assessment establishes criteria for effective case management, such as identifying and addressing criminogenic needs and re-entry barriers. We have added programs for supervised offenders, such as SMART, an acronym for Supervision, Monitoring, Accountability, Responsibility and Treatment, and the "PORTAL to Success" program, which provides basic life skills programming for parolees, shock probationers and select probationers. We have also developed programs to help offenders with parenting; teach them to anticipate and cope with a potential relapse into substance abuse; and examine the psychological component of their behavior. We secured grant funding to allow us to staff all our prisons with re-entry coordinators and to provide four additional probation and parole officers in Jefferson County, which has the highest concentration of individuals under supervision. Adopting ground-breaking strategies for managing the prison population As Secretary of Kentucky's Justice and Public Safety Cabinet, I served on the task force that drafted House Bill 463, the 2011 landmark legislation that aims to decrease the state's felon population, trim incarceration costs, reduce crime and improve public safety. The bill earned strong bipartisan support, passing the Senate unanimously and receiving only one nonconcurring vote in the House. The Public Safety and Offender Accountability Act, as HB 463 is known, modernizes Kentucky drug laws by differentiating between casual possessors and traffickers, and reducing prison time for low-risk, non-violent offenders who possess small amounts of illegal drugs. It then reinvests a portion of the savings from reduced prison costs into drug treatment opportunities for offenders who need help. The law also strengthened probation and parole functions by basing key decisions, such as level of oversight, on the risk posed by offenders. And it improved supervision by giving these officers tools to impose immediate, graduated sanctions for minor violations, allowing an officer to get an offender's attention without sending him or her back to prison. We continue to meet with stakeholders to monitor the impacts of HB 463 to identify unintended consequences, January 2013 Bench & Bar 7

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