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Read Pew's report on Philly's jails in full
Courtesy of North Escambia
Read Pew's report on Philly's jails in full
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| Courtesy of North Escambia |
In this week's A Million Stories, we told you about the recent report on Philadelphia's jails put out by the Pew Charitable Trusts:
Good news, Philadelphia: After a decade of our prison population going up, up, up, it finally, magically, went down. From January 2009 to now, the average daily count dropped from 9,787 to 8,306 — which is still way overcrowded (the city spends 7 cents of every tax dollar on jails, in fact), but hey, a little less so!
There was only one problem: The city hadn't a clue what happened, until the Pew Charitable Trusts conducted a yearlong study of the prisons. Turns out, the answer has little to do with the city itself, but rather, a 2008 Pennsylvania law requiring that inmates serving between two- and five-year sentences be sent to state prisons instead of local lockups.
You can stop patting yourself on the back now, Mayor Nutter.
At a panel discussion hosted by Pew on May 19, the mayor did indeed pat himself on the back — quite a bit — saying that the population was "down … certainly not by accident" and that there were plenty of "things we're doing here to drive down the prison population." Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Everett Gillison concurred, claiming that the state law only accounted for about 300 of the 1,500 fewer prisoners in 2010, as compared to 2009. (The Pew report notes that fewer arrests and changes in the Philadelphia Adult Probation and Parole Department were also factors in the decreased jail population.)
Gillison says his ultimate goal is to be able to shut down an entire jail — indeed, that's where the real savings will come from — and that he only needs "1,000 fewer inmates" to do it. The panel, which included Gillison, District Attorney Seth Williams, Rev. Ernest McNear and Vera Institute of Justice director Michael Jacobson, discussed several possible ways to further reduce the jail population: relying less on cash bail, updating and following the bail guidelines, more day reporting centers, more diversion programs, etc. However, the discussion kept coming back to this: What if you let out the wrong 1,000 people? Or, more to the point, what if you let out just one person who kills a cop, while the other 999 freed people hurt no one?
Williams put it this way: "I don't know if the public cares if the prison population goes up or down," noting that safety is people's main concern.
And with that in mind, it's hard to tell what, if anything, will be done to further reduce the jail population.
You can download the report in full here.
Well, the hole in the City budget should get that jail figure down nicely. Nutter was so busy spending $12,500,000.00 to clear the way for Pew's Barnes Move that there will be a lot less money for police protection & public safety. Thanks Pew. (P.S. Pew why don't you concentrate on Marine Life & NOAA instead of screwing up The Barnes in Merion?)
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