how to Cut a Criminal Justice Budget Without Sacrificing Safety: Four states show it can be done.

• Author: Siebrase, Jamie
• Position: CIVIL AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE

About 5% of states' general fund budgets go to criminal justice--just over $45 billion in fiscal year 2019--so many lawmakers are determined to make every dollar count.

But that's not as easy as it might sound.

"The challenge for legislators is to reduce the use of high-cost, low-return policies and shift the savings into programs that have been shown to reduce crime," says Jake Horowitz, director of The Pew Charitable Trusts' Public Safety Performance Project.

Lawmakers have a variety of policy options at their disposal, but what actually works? Programs in Louisiana, Michigan, Oregon and Missouri provide some answers.

Reducing Prison Admissions in Louisiana

Incarcerating people eats up a big chunk of any state's criminal justice budget. While a variety of policy levers could be used to reduce prison populations, "the fear is that if we reduce populations to address budget considerations, we'll have more crime," Horowitz says. "People who study crime know it's more complex than that."

Over the five-year period from 2010 to 2015, for example, the country's imprisonment rate fell 8.4%, while the combined violent and property crime rate declined 14.6%, according to U.S. Justice Department statistics.

The crime rate doesn't drive a state's prison population--policy choices do, Horowitz says. For decades, Louisiana recorded the nation's highest imprisonment rate per capita, even though it had a nearly identical crime rate to its neighbors. Once the Louisiana Legislature created the Justice Reinvestment Task Force, researchers discovered that Louisiana was sending people to prison for nonviolent crimes at nearly three times the rate of states such as South Carolina and Florida, says Terry Schuster, manager at Pew's Public Safety Performance Project.

"We were leading the nation with the highest incarceration rate, the majority of which were incarcerated for nonviolent offenses," Louisiana Rep. Joseph Marino (I) says.

Policy reforms, then, centered on reducing sentences for nonviolent crimes and crafting early release options for individuals with nonviolent convictions. In 2017, state lawmakers passed 10 bills projected to reduce Louisiana's prison and community supervision populations by 10% and 12%, respectively, over the next 10 years, Horowitz says. New measures steer people convicted of less serious crimes away from prison. In addition to altering drug sentencing rules and strengthening incarceration alternatives, legislators changed "good...