Keypoints
FACTORS IMPACTING PRISON OVERCROWDING
¬ Prison overcrowding impacts all criminal justice agencies.
¬ Less than 25 percent of the average daily population of sentenced offenders is incarcerated; the majority are supervised in the community.
¬ For the past 20 years, Connecticut's prisons have operated at or over capacity despite the addition of thousands of new beds since 1990 and a steady 10-year decrease in crime and arrest rates.
¬ Department of Correction lacks both a sufficient number of beds to house total inmate population and an adequate system of high security beds to manage high-risk population.
¬ Correctional system is hampered by inaccurate population projections and lack of a needs analysis of total offender population, but in particular of the inmate population.
¬ The number of inmates released early from prison to community supervision or parole has dramatically decreased.
¬ Types of crimes for which offenders are convicted and sentenced to prison has not changed significantly since early 1990s.
¬ Almost 70 percent of all convicted offenders admitted to DOC have been sentenced to three years or less and most of those (47 percent) for one year or less.
¬ The court has not significantly changed its sentencing practices in imposing prison terms, but recently there has been an increase in the number of sentences of between five to 10 years and a decrease in sentences of one year or less.
¬ Violent crimes generally receive the longest prison sentence (about six years) and drug offenses the next longest (almost four years).
¬ Any increase in sentence length multiplied by the thousands of offenders sent to prison results in a sizable increase in the incarcerated population.
¬ Convicted inmates are remaining incarcerated for a greater portion of their court-imposed prison sentence.
¬ The "tough on crime" policy has allowed criminal justice agencies to take a more conservative and less controversial approach toward punishing convicted offenders.