Smart criminal justice legislation improves safety in Kansas.

 Print

Email Favorites Twitter Facebook

When Dorothy immortalized Kansas with a few soft-spoken words, “Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more,” the greatest problem many people associated with the state was the occasional tornado. In the seventy years since then however, corrections costs and rising crime rates became increasingly critical issues for the state. Like Dorothy’s journey to Oz though, Kansas’s quest for effective corrections policies has found a great success with the helping hand of Justice Reinvestment. With justice reinvestment, states use a complete analysis of their criminal justice system to develop a data driven policy strategy. These strategies create a cycle of positive change as they lower corrections costs, reduce recidivism, increase public safety and then reinvest the savings into continuing those improvements.

In the early part of the decade Kansas faced high rates of parole and probation failure, hefty corrections costs and crowded prisons – much like the rest of the nation. In 2003, inmates released on parole were more likely to find themselves back behind bars within five years than they were to succeed. Just five years later however, the new story wasn’t about how many inmates had returned on new offences, but rather how the state’s parole reforms had made Kansas a model for the nation to follow.

Just what was it that Kansas had done to cause this dramatic turn-around? Just like Texas, New Hampshire, and many other states, Kansas partnered with the Council of State Governments Justice Center to use research driven policy reforms to save their corrections system from the strains of high costs and rising prison populations.

In 2003 the Department of Corrections and state legislature began discussing the problem of probation and parole failures and quickly saw that the problem was rooted in a lack of cooperation. While parole officers tried to rehabilitate, prisons sought to punish and contain – why not start rehabilitating prisoners before they get to the parole office?

The first step was to get everyone on the same page. Personnel were trained understand the data-driven nature of justice reinvestment and equipped with the skills they would need to target high risk offenders and provide effective supervision and treatment.

In 2007 the State Senate provided funding and set concrete goals as it passed An Act Concerning the Department of Corrections. The Act provided a $4 million in grants to local community corrections programs and provided an incentive for program participants with a 60-day credit for early release upon completion. The reform promised to lower parole revocation rates by 20% in two years – a goal it met in just one year.

These smart reforms halted the growing prison population and reduced it by 7.5%, lowered parole revocation rates by nearly 50% and lowered the crime rate of parolees by 35%. The strategy did more than make streets safer though, over the course of five years the state will save an estimated $80.2 million. True to the spirit of justice reinvestment, the state immediately reinvested $7 million into treatment programs to keep the trend going.

In fact, policy changes like these made in Kansas were so successful that in 2008 the Second Chance Act granted $55 million to be used by state and local governments for programs to promote successful prisoner reentry. Kansas Senator, Sam Brownback has continued to actively support the Second Chance Act whose grants authorized for reentry programs in 2010 totaled $100 million.