Proponents of Utah’s criminal justice reform bill of 2015 say it’s been “very effective” at cutting the prison population, saving taxpayers money and getting help to people addicted to drugs. However, treatment challenges remain, and local jail populations are higher.
Marshall Thompson, director of the Utah Sentencing Commission, said Utah was years ahead of federal lawmakers, who voted last week on changes impacting the federal prison system.
The 2015 state law dropped certain drug possession crimes from felonies to misdemeanors and called for additional funding to go toward treatment programs.
Utah’s prison population down but drug treatment challenges remain after 2015 reforms
“Public safety has increased as well,” Thompson said, “and then we can take those resources that before were tied up paying for incarceration and put those towards drug treatment, mental health treatment.”
One consequence of the reforms has been an increase in county jail populations, which are up about 6 percent, according to a study completed by the public policy research group Utah Foundation.
“Those local jails are going to tend not to have treatment programs as the state prisons will have,” said Peter Reichard, president of Utah Foundation.
Thompson said some grant funding was available to county jails, and he said the higher jail populations were not a sizeable shift.
“You’ll spend more time in prison on the felony than you would on a misdemeanor,” Thompson said, “so we’re still cutting the total time that a lot of people would spend incarcerated, so that’s a savings across the board.”