State lawmakers will consider legislation during the upcoming session that will focus on several ways to reduce Louisiana’s prison population, such as implementing a felony class system and expanding alternatives to incarceration.

Officials with the group Louisianians for Prison Alternatives discussed the proposals on Tuesday with a group of local criminal justice stakeholders. John Burkhart, a criminal justice reform fellow for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Louisiana has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world, with more than 36,000 inmates in 2015. Meanwhile, its crime rate is similar to neighboring states with smaller prison populations.

Burkhart said Louisiana spends $625 million on corrections per year — the third-highest expense behind education and health care. He said the state would save $49 million per year if it had Oklahoma’s imprisonment rate, the second highest nationwide.

Burkhart said the state needs to address the issue of mass incarceration, which has resulted in plenty of dollars spent and a lack of rehabilitation opportunities for offenders.

“We’ve just run out of other solutions,” he said. “It’s too easy to throw people in prison.”

State lawmakers passed legislation in 2015 that created the Louisiana Justice Reinvestment Task Force. The task force was made up of several stakeholders, including sheriffs and public defenders. The Pew Charitable Trusts was brought in to help compile data about Louisiana’s criminal justice system.

The data are being used to draft legislation that Burkhart said will be presented during the upcoming session, which begins April 10. He said Senate President John Alario, R-Westwego, and Sen. Danny Martiny, R-Metairie, are expected to handle the measure during the session.

Some other ideas proposed include reinvesting money saved from sentencing and corrections reforms, along with tailoring legal financial obligations to a person’s ability to pay and modifying penalties for failure two pay.

Burkhart said Louisiana sends nonviolent offenders to prison 1.5 to 3 times more than that of neighboring states with similar crime rates. He said nonviolent offenders make up 86 percent of the state’s prison population.

King Alexander, director of the 3rd Congressional District for the Louisiana Association for Criminal Defense Lawyers, said passing the legislation will be “one small step” toward criminal justice reform in Louisiana. He said the state can’t afford to spend what it now does on corrections.

“We’re in such a fiscal crisis right now,” he said. “We don’t have a choice anymore, fiscally.”

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Online: www.prisonreformla.com, www.facebook.com/louisianansforprisonalternatives.

MGN Online