Kentucky's Unlikely Journey to Rational Drug Crime Reform

If you read the news stories this spring about Kentucky's prison reform laws, you probably shrugged it off as unlikely or superficial.

Amazingly, it is neither. Even more amazingly, backward Kentucky has taken a giant leap forward in replacing incarceration for drug possession with genuine drug treatment.

It's an incredible story, and Ronnie Ellis has it:

How a ‘Tough-on-Crime’ State Became Smart on Crime: Kentucky’s overhaul of its criminal justice system this spring is a textbook example of genuine bipartisanship

For three decades, Kentucky politicians proved they were tough on crime. At every opportunity, they stiffened sentences and added offenses to the state’s penal code.

They nearly bankrupted the state.

Kentucky’s corrections budget grew from $30 million in 1980 to nearly $470 million in 2010, even as lawmakers cut $1.8 billion from the state’s budget in the grip of a deep recession. The prison population grew 80 percent between 1997 and 2009, the year Kentucky led the nation in the rate of incarceration.

Of 22,000 state felons that year, 8,000 were in county jails that became dependent on state funding.

But the crime rate remained relatively flat, below the national average, and about what it was when the tough on crime movement began.

The state’s justice system seemed ripe for change. But no one expected it to be easy.

When some legislators in the Kentucky General Assembly tried to reduce the strain imposed on the state budget by prison overcrowding in 2009, by inserting parole credit provisions in the budget to release around 1,500 prisoners, prosecutors and law enforcement howled.

A challenge from a local prosecutor and the state attorney general to remove the provisions lost in court.

Nevertheless, few could have predicted what happened in late February this year. After a year of study, Kentucky lawmakers passed a bill overhauling the state’s drug laws, as reforming its sentencing, probation and parole system. Following passage in the Kentucky House (Feb 17) and Senate (Feb 28), the bill became law upon the signature of Gov. Steve Beshear on March 3.

Read the whole thing.