The Ohio House of Representatives voted Thursday to approve the Senate amendments to House Bill 86, a comprehensive set of reforms that strive to overhaul Ohio’s criminal sentencing laws.

House Bill 86 aims to more successfully address prison population growth and streamline court, jail, and prison operations.

Making sense of the Armed Career Criminal Act’s “residual clause” has become an almost annual rite for the Supreme Court. Sykes v. United States, decided last week, is the court’s fourth attempt in five years. The continuing confusion is obvious in the sharp, separate dissents from Antonin Scalia and Elena Kagan.

As the country has increasingly turned against capital punishment as barbaric and horrifyingly prone to legal abuses, defenders are pointing to the emotional needs of the families of murder victims — “co-victims” to those who study crime — as justification. Many family members, however, have said they want no part of that.

Corrections costs for the states have quadrupled in the last 20 years — to about $52 billion a year nationally — making prison spending their second-fastest growing budget item after Medicaid. To cut those costs, the states must first rethink parole and probation policies that drive hundreds of thousands of people back to prison every year, not for new crimes, but for technical violations that present no threat to public safety.

Cleve Foster, a former Army recruiter convicted of murder, was scheduled to be executed earlier this week in Huntsville, Tex., when the Supreme Court rightly granted a stay pending a review of his case.

There are so many reasons why the death penalty should be repealed everywhere.

There is new evidence that state governments are finally understanding what a tragic mistake they made during the 1990s when they began trying ever larger numbers of children as adults instead of sending them to the juvenile justice system.

Prosecutors argued that harsh sentencing would protect the public from violent, youthful predators.

When President Obama listed empathy as a valuable trait for a justice during his 2009 search to replace David Souter, the idea drew scorn from some conservatives who saw it as an excuse for being soft. But a Supreme Court ruling this week provides evidence of how useful empathy is, and of how not using it can lead to glaring injustice.

Perhaps as many as three-quarters of New York State’s 57,000 prison inmates need drug counseling or treatment to have a chance at productive, crime-free lives once they are released. A three-year study of drug and alcohol abuse programs in the New York State Department of Corrections suggests that prisons are failing to provide adequate treatment programs for the tens of thousands of inmates who need them.

Douglas Warney, a person of limited mental capabilities who has been diagnosed with AIDS and AIDS dementia, served nine years in New York State prisons for a murder he did not commit. Now the state is seeking to compound the injustice by denying Mr.

Ohio prison officials say the state has hit an 11-year low in the rate of inmates winding up back behind bars after they get out.

The Department of Rehabilitation and Correction said Thursday that 34 percent of Ohio inmates now return to prison within three years of release, down from the previous recidivism rate of 36.4 percent.

On Tuesday, Judge Jeremy Fogel of the Federal District Court in northern California toured a new facility at San Quentin State Prison for executing inmates. Five years ago, in Morales v. Tilton, he ordered the state to halt all executions after he found that the way it administered its lethal injection created too much risk that an inmate would suffer extreme pain.

Governor Cuomo’s new budget proposes two sensible steps toward the long overdue goal of closing down unnecessary prisons.

In the last decade, crime rates and the prison population have declined significantly in New York State. Yet prison costs have soared. As part of Gov.