While Oklahoma’s imprisonment rate is the second highest in the nation, Oklahoma’s challenges with long-term prison growth are not unique. Across the country, state prison populations expanded rapidly starting in the early 1970s, and state officials have spent an increasing share of taxpayer dollars to keep pace with soaring prison costs. From the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, spending on corrections was the second-fastest growing state budget category, behind only Medicaid. Nationally, in 2015, 1 in 15 state general fund dollars went to corrections.
However, in recent years many states have successfully taken steps to curb their prison population growth while holding public safety paramount. After 38 years of uninterrupted growth, the national prison population declined 5.5 percent between 2009 and 2015.
The national crime rate has been falling since the early 1990s and is now at its lowest level since 1968. However, the strongest research credits prison growth with at most one-quarter to one third of the crime drop since its peak in the early 1990s. Other major factors behind the crime decline include better policing, changing demographics, increased private security, and improved theft prevention technologies. In short, the increased use of incarceration had an important but
minor role in improved public safety. Additionally, there is general consensus among experts that, as states have incarcerated higher numbers of lower-level offenders and held them for longer periods of time, the country has passed the point of diminishing returns, meaning that the additional use of prison has little if any crime reduction effect today.
Instead, states are recognizing the value of using research and implementing best practices to address crime and reduce recidivism. Since 2010, 31 states have reduced both their imprisonment and crime rates.
Dramatic reforms in law-and-order states like Texas and increasingly supportive public opinion have combined with state budget pressures to create a growing national conversation that puts prison spending under greater scrutiny than ever before. For the better part of the past four decades, the most common question that policymakers have asked about their state corrections budgets was, “How many more prisons do we need?” Today, state leaders from both parties are asking a much tougher question: “How do we get taxpayers a better public safety return on their corrections dollars?”
Many states have adopted policies to rein in the size and cost of their corrections systems through a “justice reinvestment” strategy. Alaska, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, Utah, and many others have implemented reforms to protect public safety and control corrections costs. These states revised their sentencing and corrections policies to focus state prison beds on violent and career offenders and then reinvested a portion of the savings from averted prison growth into more cost-effective strategies to reduce recidivism.
In 2011, for example, policymakers in Georgia faced a projected eight percent increase in the prison population over the next five years, at a cost of $264 million. Rather than spend additional taxpayer dollars on prisons, Georgia’s leaders looked for more cost‐effective solutions. The state legislature unanimously passed a set of reforms that controlled prison growth through changes to drug and property offense statutes and improved public safety by investing in drug and mental health courts and treatment. Between 2012 and 2015, Georgia’s crime rate fell 10 percent and the prison population declined 5.9 percent, giving taxpayers better public safety at a lower cost.
In these and other states, working groups have focused on research on how to improve public safety and have integrated the perspectives of the three branches of government and key system stakeholders. This data-driven, inclusive process resulted in wide-ranging innovations to the laws and policies that govern who goes to prison, how long they stay, and how they return to their communities.