Kentucky Partners with Pew Center to Lower CJ Costs

Kentucky has long been on the wrong side of the criminal justice policy spectrum. Though their serious crime rate has been lower than the national average since the 1960s, they have seen their prison population grow 45% since 2000—and 442% since 1980. Unsurprisingly, the result of locking that many people up is out of control spending. In only the twenty years between 1989 and 2009, Kentucky's total spending on corrections increased from $117 million t0 $513 million per year.

That said, it seems like the Bluegrass State is finally thinking about turning things around.

Last week it was announced that the state would partner with the Pew Center to evaluate the reasons for Kentucky's ballooning prison population and CJ budget. The results of the study the partnership will produce are to be turned into legislative recommendations early next year, and introduced to the state legislature to be turned into law.

When announcing the new partnership, Governor Beshear told his audience, “Every dollar spent unnecessarily on prisons is a dollar not available to educate our kids, to provide health care for our vulnerable population and to create jobs in this down economy.”

The partnership is similar to the one Pew entered into with Philadelphia awhile back, which resulted in some positive and groundbreaking recommendations. And it's another step toward the place we ought to be as a country—enacting effective CJ policies, dictated by efficacy and not ideology.

As one state senator supportive of the new initiative put it, “I think we've got to try to educate our communities to accept database research and provide alternatives for some of these nonviolent people: Intervention, education, treatment with supervision."

The results of the state's partnership with Pew are, of course, unknowable as of now. And even if the resultant policy recommendations are laudable, there's no guarantee the legislature will accept them. But all that said, it is no small thing that long-recalcitrant Kentucky has joined the growing movement toward data driven justice policy.

Photo credit: Stuart Conner