PAROLE, POLITICS AND PERSPECTIVE

The Pataki administration is right to back early release for nonviolent
inmates

Less than a week after the state Assembly returned to Albany to capitulate
to calls from the governor and the state Senate to severely restrict parole
for first-time violent criminals, the Pataki administration's prison
policies can be seen in a more complete context.

It turns out that the state has been releasing more nonviolent felons, into
drug treatment usually, at the same time it has been denying parole more and
more frequently to violent felons.

It's an encouraging policy for the most part, particularly so in the wake of
yet another session in which the Legislature failed to rectify the draconian
drug laws of the Rockefeller era. The Pataki administration is right,
certainly, that the role of the state's prisons should be modified to what
it has been historically -- namely to house violent offenders.

A more compassionate approach toward nonviolent, drug-impaired offenders
begs the question, however, of just why the Pataki administration has been
so quiet about what amounts to a sharp deviation from past administrations
and current debate alike.

The final step of the total surrender by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver,
remember, was to agree to restrict parole without further increasing funding
for drug rehabilitation and education for the inmates who would be serving
those longer sentences.

If the state isn't going to offer sufficient levels of drug treatment to
those incarcerated in its prisons, then it should continue to steer
nonviolent inmates toward early release and subsequent rehabilitation. In
the past two years, the number of such inmates has declined by almost 1,000.
That's a welcome break from 1982 through 1996 -- which include three terms
of the Cuomo administration -- when the number of nonviolent inmates in New
York soared from 8,297 to 33,865. In all, almost 5,000 more inmates would
have been in prison at the start of this year if they had been required to
serve even their minimum sentences.

That's almost 5,000 lives that can be more likely salvaged. And at the cost
of $27,000 per inmate, per year, that's an annual savings of $135 million a
year. It adds up to a policy that the Pataki administration should assert
more prominently and pursue even more vigorously. It's the best case yet, in
fact, for repealing the Rockefeller drug laws altogether.

Checked-by: "Rolf Ernst"