INDIANA'S ANSWER TO PRISON COSTS

For states that are serious about trimming deficits, out-of-control
prison costs are a good place to start cutting. The expenses of
housing and caring for more than one million state prison inmates has
quadrupled in the last decade from about $12 billion a year to more
$52 billion a year. This, in turn, has squeezed budgets for essential
programs like education.

Governors seeking wisdom on how to proceed could start by looking at
what Gov. Mitch Daniels, a Republican, is trying to accomplish in Indiana.

The centerpiece of Mr. Daniels's approach is a set of reforms
governing sentencing and parole. Judges would be allowed to fit
sentences to crimes and have the flexibility to impose shorter
sentences for nonviolent offenses. A poorly structured parole system
would be reorganized to focus on offenders who actually present a
risk to public safety.

Addicts would be given drug treatment to try to make them less likely
to be rearrested. And there would be incentives for towns to handle
low-level offenders instead of sending them into more costly state prisons.

Mr. Daniels devoted the last year to building a wide political
consensus behind these ideas, beginning with a study from the Council
of State Governments Justice Center, a prison policy group that has
helped several states revise their corrections strategies.

In partnership with the Pew Center on the States' Public Safety
Performance Project, the council discovered that Indiana's prison
count had grown by 41 percent between 2000 and 2009 - an increase
three times that of neighboring states. It also found that the
increase had been caused not by violent criminals but by drug addicts
- - who needed treatment, not jail - and by low-level, nonviolent
criminals. Indiana, the study found, was punishing both groups much
more severely than neighboring states.

Unless current policies were changed, the study said, the state
prison population would rise by another 21 percent by 2017, forcing
lawmakers to come up with an estimated $1.2 billion for new prisons.
Indiana could cut its inmate count significantly and save almost all
of that money if it invested a modest sum - about $28 million - in
the kinds of changes that Mr. Daniels has now included in his reform package.

A legislative package containing these reforms has been introduced in
the Indiana Legislature. If it passes, as it should, Indiana will
show the nation what good things can happen when leaders apply good sense.