Editorial: Finances aren't only target for reform in criminal justice system

Both in Springfield and in Washington, the two major political parties seem to have found one topic on which they can share some middle ground - criminal justice reform.

Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat, spent some time with our editorial board recently touting a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill he sponsored with Iowa Republican Charles Grassley, and last week The Associated Press reported on efforts promoted by Gov. Bruce Rauner to re-evaluate the state's approach to incarceration and, ultimately trim the 40,000-strong Illinois prison population by 25 percent. That Illinois needs a new vision for its approach to criminal justice can hardly be denied. Just 40 years ago, the state housed only 6,000 prisoners.

The picture isn't much better on the federal level. According to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, the nation's prison population has swollen more than threefold since1980 when 2 million people were incarcerated. A key factor in these statistics, justice experts will tell you, are mandatory sentencing laws that establish harsh sentences for various crimes, particularly drug possession and drug sales, which judges are bound by law to enforce. A central component of reform movements naturally target these mandatory minimums and seek to give judges some latitude in setting prison time for individuals convicted of certain nonviolent crimes.

This surely is a reasonable place to start, and the financial impact, considering reported costs of housing - or "warehousing" in Durbin's phrase - a prisoner is $22,000 to $40,000 a year, are attention-getting if not compelling. But financial savings cannot be the only factor driving reform. Indeed, comprehensive reform needs to re-evaluate our basic vision for prisons in the first place.

We know that operating them simply as a "penal system" does little or nothing to reduce crime or recidivism over time. We know that, as Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart is quick to point out, prisons are often de-facto mental institutions for men and women with untreated mental illnesses. We know that if we let drug dealers out of prison early with no means of self support, we are doing little more than taking a short break on that $22,000-a-year incarceration bill before reincurring police and prosecution costs to bring them back into the system - all the while permitting them to resume the debilitating business of destroying lives that landed them in the system in the first place.

True reform must address all these factors, not simply seek to lessen the number of people behind bars. So, yes, Sen. Durbin and Gov. Rauner, and all who side with you, we agree that it's time for a thorough revision of the nature of the state's and the nation's prisons. And we're glad that many Republicans and Democrats are finding common ground in examining how we operate our justice system.

But as government moves - which we surely hope it does - toward redirecting our approach to incarceration, we would emphasize that the reform can't merely be on the cost side of the equation but must place at least equal intensity on the justice.