Great Wall Street Journal article this week about the economic crisis and fiscal austerity coming home to roost in federal law enforcement and sentencing/corrections policy. Full article here. My favorite part is the bullet points:
“—Increasing the amount of time deducted from prison terms for good behavior, which would immediately qualify some 4,000 federal convicts for release, and another 4,000 over the next 10 years.
—Eliminating the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Gang Intelligence Center, for a savings of $8 million in the next budget year.
—Sharing less of the proceeds from property confiscated from criminals with state and local authorities, and eliminating other funding to local police departments for some operations. The change would reduce spending by $120 million, according to the White House.”
And I found this paragraph the most intriguing: “The U.S. Marshals Service has quietly shelved the Fugitive Safe Surrender Program, which has cleared the books on thousands of low-level criminal cases in the past six years. Under the program, law enforcement officials set up temporary shop in a church or a public setting, urging fugitives to turn themselves in to resolve old warrants and often drawing hundreds in a single day.”
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