Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee says he has no intention of giving up on criminal justice reform, even though his proposals were derailed when legislators passed a no-cost-increase budget amid concerns about the coronavirus and a potential economic collapse in March.
It was a personal experience that helped him decide to tackle such reform in the first place, so we never believed it would become a lost cause for the first-term chief executive.
Nevertheless, some state backers of bipartisan support for general criminal justice reform were unhappy the legislative session went by with little action on it. Yet the recent legislative special session did tack on enhanced penalties and mandatory-minimum sentences on some protest-related offenses.
The Republican governor had released a package of data-driven policy recommendations that would address issues of public safety in December. The package included 23 recommendation made by the Criminal Justice Task Force he established.
The package - created in partnership with the chief justice of the state Supreme Court, the lieutenant governor and the state House speaker, among others - sought to strengthen responses to individuals with behavioral health needs, equalize the treatment of those housed in local jails with those housed in state prisons, better tailor response to different types of offenses, improve the efficiency and effectiveness of community supervision, and minimize barriers to successful re-entry.
Although two bills carrying most of the recommendations passed the Senate Judiciary Committee pre-virus, the recommendations never got a full examination once the economic potential for the coronavirus became clear. The package, although it was said to result in an annual $59 million savings for the state, would have an up-front cost. And some legislators in Lee's own party said some of its measures went too far.
The up-front cost, the governor told the Free Press editorial page Monday, is what stopped it since legislators ultimately were not funding anything with new costs outside of mandatory increases.
However, Lee said that the virus-related delay actually may be a blessing in disguise for the legislative package. It's an opportunity to bring in more stakeholders.
The 2020 legislative session allowed the administration to see who didn't like certain aspects of the recommendations.
"We'll be much wiser in crafting next year's legislation. We can talk through [the disagreements] with them," he said. "With that context, we'll improve our efforts going forward. It will allow us to navigate through [the tenets] more likely to pass."
Already, some of the components were multi-year in their implementation, so the 2021 session will see the beginning of those measures rather than their continuation.
Lee said his administration plans to continue to engage stakeholders this summer so that new plans for the criminal justice reform package will be ready "well before the session," so everyone concerned can "see what bills we're looking at."
In his days as a Franklin businessman, it was his involvement with a nonprofit ministry called Men of Valor that prompted his strong interest in recidivism and reforms in the first place. The ministry matched volunteers with men coming out of prison, and he said he spent one morning a week with his match for several years.
"Returning to prison and re-entry and things that relate to public safety" were what he wanted to tackle, based on his experience, Lee said before being elected in 2018. "I really got interested in that subject thinking we can do better than that" - the state's recidivism rate - in Tennessee.
The numbers, according to information on the state website, were daunting. Tennessee's incarceration rate over the past 10 years had risen to 10% above the national average, prisons were a $1 billion spending item in the state budget, and the state had the nation's fourth highest violent crime rate and a recidivism rate of about 50% of those who had been released within the last three years.
Even without the measures advocated by the Criminal Justice Task Force this year, legislators did pass what Lee said were "several small pieces" of criminal justice reform legislation. And a year earlier they had passed a measure that eliminated the fee eligible individuals had to pay to expunge their convictions.
The recent special session - and perhaps House Majority Leader William Lamberth, R-Portland, calling the enhanced penalties legislation that was passed a "criminal justice reform bill," and Lee's willingness to sign it - resurrected questions about the governor's commitment to actual reform. But he maintains he's all in.
"It's a bipartisan issue," he said. "It's not a consistent agreement [on every aspect], but most everybody wants to see some level of criminal justice reform. I'm very personally invested in it. I absolutely think it ought to be reformed. I think we'll have a similarly robust approach next year."