STATE CHIEF JUSTICE PRICE SAYS MISSOURI PRISONS OVERPOPULATED

Approximately One in 250 Missouri Residents Is Incarcerated.

County Jail on Oct 22, 2009. Chief Justice Ray Price cited in his
State of the Judiciary address that non-violent offenders are the main
demographic for Missouri prisons' population problem.

In his State of the Judiciary address, State Chief Justice Ray Price
called for a reformation of the Missouri prison system, saying prisons
are overpopulated with nonviolent offenders.

"We continue to over-incarcerate nonviolent offenders, while we have
failed to expand drug courts and other diversionary and re-entry
programs to capacity," Price said in his address. "The result is a
state that is not as safe as we want it to be and a waste of taxpayer
dollars."

As of December 2010, Missouri had 30,623 incarcerated persons, which
is approximately one in every 250 people.

According to Show-Me Daily, Joseph Eddy of the Missouri Department of
Corrections estimates it costs approximately $44.68 per inmate per
day, meaning the cost per inmate in Missouri equates to $1,368,235 -
or about $500 million a year.

Gov. Jay Nixon proposed $660 million of the state budget be reserved
for corrections in Fiscal Year 2011 and increases the amount proposed
to $661 million in FY2012. Nixon proposed spending $1.23 billion on
higher education in FY2011 and decreasing that amount to $1.11 billion
in FY2012.

MU associate law professor S. David Mitchell said treating all drug
offenders as the same was a large reason for the overpopulation
problem. Mitchell was elected to be a Supreme Court Faculty Fellow and
will work with Price in the future.

"One of the reasons is that we are experiencing the result of the
consequences of a failed War on Drugs policy, when we changed our
focus to locking up and incarcerating drug offenders and traffickers,
when we combined them into one group," Mitchell said. "So we have this
overpopulation of nonviolent offenders who shouldn't be there, basically."

Frank Bowman, a Floyd R. Gibson Missouri Endowed Professor of Law,
said the War on Drugs may have something to do with the overpopulation
of Missouri prisons, but he said the majority of people in prison for
drug-related crimes were not there for mere possession, but for
trafficking.

"By far the overwhelming majority of people who are actually in prison
for drug offenses are going to be people who are there for some form
of trafficking offense," Bowman said. "Now if the question is, 'Is a
lot of prison crowding problem attributable to the fact that we
incarcerate people for drug cases in the first place,' then yeah, I
think that's plainly true."

According to data for FY2009, the Missouri Department of Corrections
had a population with 38.1 percent violent offenders, 24.2 percent
nonviolent offenders, 18.4 percent drug offenders, 15.4 percent sexual
offenders and 3.8 percent DWI offenders.

Bowman said he doesn't think dividing crimes by whether they were
violent or nonviolent is necessarily a good way to look at it.

"I don't think the category of violent and nonviolent offenders is
necessarily a very useful one," Bowman said. "Sometimes people commit
a crime of violence like striking other people, that in my view need
incarceration a great deal less than some career fraud criminals."

Mitchell said he thought incarceration was the wrong approach to
handling nonviolent drug offenders. Instead he suggested creating a
system of abuse treatment facilities.

"The criminal conduct is merely the symptom of a larger problem, which
is their substance abuse," Mitchell said.