Task force recommends how to cut US prisoner count by 60,000

[flowers]

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/291ac03d56aa421789c6345479c5fabf/task-force-recommends-ways-cut-us-prison-count-60000

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 suggestions were released Tuesday amid a national dialogue across the federal government about overhauling the country's criminal justice system, which critics say is overly expensive and has resulted in unduly long sentences for nonviolent drug criminals. A bipartisan effort to cut the prison population appears stalled for the moment in Congress, though the White House and Justice Department have encouraged changes in how suspects are prosecuted and sentenced at the federal level.

The recommendations from the Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections provide concrete steps prosecutors, judges, prison officials and policymakers 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 imposed on 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," J.C. Watts Jr., a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma and task force chairman, said at a news conference announcing the findings.
 

Congress created the nine-member task force two years ago to recommend changes to the corrections system. The panel concluded the system is in crisis, gobbling up a quarter of the Justice Department budget. Nearly 80 percent of drug crime prisoners have no serious history of violence, and more than half

Oh goody.....dems have 60k more votes this Nov.