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Again I’d like to report on some of the things that we’re doing in the Corrections
Committee. We are looking at what I consider to be very, very vital legislation in trying
to make reforms in our corrections programs in the state of Indiana. We have had, for
many years, for at least thirty years, a mentality that we had to just continue to add more crimes
to the books, locking more and more people up and extending the period of time that they’re
in prison. We are dealing in the Corrections Committee with Senate Bill five-sixty-one,
and I’m one of the co-authors on that bill, that is going to take a new look at how we
deal with people who have broken the law in one way or another. Everyone who breaks the
law is not a bad person. We have many good people who make bad mistakes. We need to be
able to segregate our thinking on how we deal with those people versus the ones that are
just truly a bad element of society, and I think with five-sixty-one we’re doing that.
We’re looking at how to get people back into the system of providing for their families
and being productive tax payers in the community. Those kind of things, as opposed to just sending
them out and expecting them to be right back in our prisons again. It cost us about thirty
thousand dollars a year for every person we have in prison. And we have about thirty-thousand
people in prison. We have, by per-capita, the most people of our state in prison of
any state in the nation. We’re not an inherently bad group of people in this state, and we
need to make sure that, as we pass laws, that we do it in a way that we’re not treating
everyone the same and locking them up and throwing away the key. We need to make sure
we get people back into society in a good and thoughtful way so that they can be productive
citizens and be with their families. I’m working on this bill. I’m very proud to
be a part of it. It’s the result of a summer study commission that I served on, and I think
it’s going to be a positive thing that we get done during this session.