WASHINGTON (AP) – The Justice Department should limit the types of cases it brings and more nonviolent criminals should be steered toward probation and away from prison, according to task force recommendations designed to cut the federal inmate count and save more than $5 billion.
The recommendations provide concrete steps prosecutors, judges, prison officials and policy makers can take to reduce prison overcrowding and ease spending on a corrections system that’s swelled in the last three decades as a result of harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug criminals.
“From severe overcrowding to an insufficient array of programs and incentives to encourage behavioral change, the system is failing those it incarcerates and the taxpayers who fund it,” said J.C. Watts Jr., a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma and chairman of the Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections.
The nine-member task force was created by Congress two years ago to recommend changes to the corrections system. The panel concluded the system is in crisis, gobbling up more than a quarter of the Justice Department budget.
The panel said if all its recommendations were implemented, the federal inmate count could drop by 60,000 by fiscal year 2024, down from its current 196,000.