It’s no secret that every state government is facing difficult budget decisions, and Kansas is no exception. One part of the budget that is expanding faster than nearly all others is the cost of prisons.
It costs Kansas $341 million each year to house about 8,700 inmates, with another 7,000 in county jails, draining resources that could be devoted to education, hospitals and highways.
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.
For Patrick Gleason, starring in a film about a professional wrestler who finds unlikely redemption at the end of his career was not just a new experience but a metaphor for his own life story.
Just a few years ago, Mr.
Whether it’s a greeting card, phone call, or gift of a new gadget, Father’s Day gives us a chance to express our thanks to our fathers. This week I am particularly thankful for the blessing my children are to me — not because of the thoughtful note or the hedge trimmer, but because I am able to spend time with them and be involved in their lives.
On June 6 Prison Fellowship® announced the appointment of James Liske as the ministry’s new CEO. Liske, who currently serves as senior pastor at Ridge Point Community Church in Holland, Michigan, will begin his term with Prison Fellowship in late July.
In April 2011, the nation’s last island prison officially closed. McNeil Island Corrections Center, which many referred to as the “good cop” to Alcatraz’s “bad cop,” was located in Puget Sound just west of Steilacoom, Washington, 700 miles north of its more infamous counterpart.
As California deeply cut spending for public schools, social services and health programs in recent years, state leaders also found themselves grappling with a court order to reduce the prison population by tens of thousands of inmates.
Some civil rights groups and criminal justice experts are now seizing on this perfect storm of chronic deficits and crowded prisons to push for wide-ranging changes to the state’s sentencing laws that would transform California’s handling of crime and punishment.
Deprived revenue: Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron estimated in 2008 that legalizing drugs could save federal, state and local governments $44 billion per year, while taxing drugs could yield an added $33 billion.
Limiting individual rights: Allow me to quote Neill Franklin, a former Baltimore narcotics cops and executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
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.
Friday marks the 40th anniversary of one of the biggest, most expensive, most destructive social policy experiments in American history: The war on drugs.
On the morning of June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon, speaking from the Briefing Room of the White House, declared: “America’s public enemy No.
On Monday, May 16, Chris Epps, commissioner of Mississippi’s department of corrections, sat at a long conference table, grasping a mound of financial documents. He was preparing to head to the state’s penitentiary, an 18,000-acre old cotton farm in the Mississippi River Delta, for the execution of a man convicted of murder nearly two decades ago.
The Supreme Court demands end to prison overcrowding, ruling that California prisons violate the rights to appropriate medical and mental health care.
Today Prison Fellowship® announced the appointment of James Liske as the ministry’s CEO. Liske, who currently serves as senior pastor at Ridge Point Community Church in Holland, Michigan, will begin his term with Prison Fellowship in late July. He succeeds Tom Pratt, who has served as interim president since October 2010.
Sentenced to a 15-year prison sentence for aggavated assault, Lee Miller felt as if he had let God down. Instead, God was preparing to show him another side of His grace.
Raised on the east side of Houston, Texas, in the ‘70s, Lee Miller never knew his father.
LAST week the Supreme Court ordered California to reduce its prison population after finding that the state’s penal system was so overcrowded that it constituted cruel and unusual punishment. What the court didn’t do, however, was provide any guidance about how to do it, giving rise to fears of violent convicts being set free and increasing crime rates.