Kansas
Step 2: Provide policymakers with options to generate savings and increase public safety.
Following the analysis of the prison population, leaders in the state legislature established a bipartisan legislative task force and worked with the Justice Center to identify policy options that would increase public safety by reducing recidivism and avert as much of the projected prison growth as possible.
To gain a sense of public attitudes toward these and related issues, state legislators commissioned a public opinion survey, which revealed that despite the enactment of various laws designed to incarcerate serious, violent offenders for longer periods of time, most Kansans continued to believe, incorrectly, that people currently sentenced to prison serve less time in prison than they did 10 years ago.4
The same poll results also showed that Kansans overwhelmingly supported providing substance abuse treatment to people in prison, and assumed, again incorrectly, that such services were widely available behind the walls. When told that strategies designed to keep offenders from failing on probation and ending up in prison could be employed to avert growth in the population, the vast majority of Kansans preferred these strategies or the combination of these strategies with some prison construction over only building more prisons. 5
At the recommendation of the task force, in May 2007, the Kansas Legislature approved a package of criminal justice legislation which included:
- creation of a performance-based grant program for community corrections programs to design local strategies to reduce revocations by 20 percent;
- establishment of a 60-day program credit to increase the number of people who successfully complete educational, vocational, and treatment programs prior to release; and
- restoration of earned time credits for good behavior for nonviolent offenders. 6
- Council of State Governments Justice Center, “Kansas Criminal Justice Public Opinion Survey,” April 2007. The Survey Research Center at the Institute for Policy and Social Research at the University of Kansas conducted the polling.
- Ibid.
- Kansas Legislature, Senate Bill 14, “An Act Concerning the Department of Corrections,” enacted 2007.