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Get it Right: Ohio lawmakers must look at prison sentences

Ohio lawmakers should listen to Auditor Dave Yost, who has shared concerns about a plan that would divert 3,400 nonviolent, fifth-degree felons from state prisons and into county jails and treatment programs over two years. Yost acknowledges the plan would save the state money; and could alleviate the overcrowding that plagues Ohio’s prison system. But the devil is in the details.

In a letter last week to Ohio House Finance Committee Chairman Ryan Smith, R-Bidwell, Yost explained the Targeted Community Alternative to Prison program could let some offenders who ought to be in prison slip through the cracks.

For example, impaired driving that injures children, money laundering in support of terrorism and serial forgery are all potentially non-sexual, non-violent fifth-degree felonies.

Both Yost and John Murphy, executive director of the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association, suggest that if lawmakers want certain crimes to be punished without prison time, they should reclassify them as misdemeanors.

“At the very least, a judge hearing such a case ought to have the discretion to impose a prison sentence for such a violation,” Yost said in his letter.

Lawmakers appear to have good intentions with the program: save the state money, thin out the overcrowding in prisons, perhaps do a better job of rehabilitating relatively small-time offenders. Now they must listen to officials such as Yost and Murphy, who want to help them get it right.

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