According to Mark Owens, Montgomery County Democratic Party Chairman, the Executive Committee of the Montgomery County Democratic Party will have a special meeting for the purpose of recommending a replacement for the 5th District Senate position vacated by Tom Roberts.

Mark said that the Senate Democratic Caucus has requested that Democratic Party county organizations that contain the 5th District each recommend up to three candidates. The 5th District is in Montgomery, Darke and Warren.

Roberts is resigning from the Ohio Senate in order to accept an appointment from Governor Strickland to the Ohio Civil Rights Commission.

Mark said that in addition to Fred Strahorn, Vic Harris also has expressed interest in the position and that, so far, Vic and Fred are the only 5th District Montgomery County Democrats who have expressed interest. Mark said anyone seeking the endorsement of the Montgomery County Democratic Party needs to contact him by March 6. He said the deadline for the Executive Committee to make its endorsement is March 13.

Last week the DDN printed an editorial, “Ohio Senate rises above democracy,” that tells that it looks like the fix is in for Strahorn to be appointed to the Ohio Senate. Strahorn is the protege of Tom Roberts, and Roberts is pressing for Strahorn to be his replacement.

After Strahorn was term limited as state representative from the 40th District, it was widely assumed in the party that he would next seek election to the Ohio Senate for the 5th District. Roberts’ strong endorsement for Strahorn means, most likely, that Strahorn gets to the Senate early and that by the time of the March 2010 primary, Strahorn will have an incumbent’s advantage.

Says the DDN, about Strahorn, “But, as if winning in that Democratic district in 2010 wouldn’t be easy enough if the seat were open, he (Strahorn) gets a year-and-a-half of incumbency going in — even as his friend and predecessor gets a job out of the deal. Nice work if you can get it.”

The Ohio Senate has 33 members and only 12 are Democrats. The 11 Senate Democrats that remain after Roberts’ resignation will be the group that determines Roberts’ replacement. The DDN’s complaint is that this process — “two handsful of people from nowhere near Dayton picking a legislator for Dayton” — hardly seems democratic. According to Owens, this process for replacement of a State Assembly member, has remained part of the Ohio Constitution every since the beginning of Ohio’s statehood in 1803.

The DDN editorial says, “Even within that not very democratic process there is apparently to be even less democracy than there might be. Sen. Roberts has said he would propose Mr. Strahorn to the Senate, and Montgomery County Democratic Party Chairman Mark Owens said last week that no other Democrat had even expressed interest.”

The replacement will serve until the term expires in January 2011. In March 2010 Democrats in the 5th District will have a chance to vote in the Democratic Primary to choose their next candidate.

One-third of all prisoners in the entire world are in U.S. prisons and jails. The U.S. has 2.8 million people locked up — the highest incarceration rate in the world.  Over the past 30 years there has been a dramatic increase in U.S. prison population.

An interesting article in Slate, by John Pfaff, says that reform is inevitable: “States are beginning to realize that large prison populations are boom-time luxuries they can no longer afford.”

But, Pfaff says, in order for reform to work it must be based on facts, not myths. The article outlines five myths about why the U.S. has such high incarceration rates:

MYTH No. 1: Long Sentences Drive Prison Population Growth.
Our data on time served is imperfect at best, but it appears that the time served by the median prisoner is about two years, sometimes much less. It is easy to focus on the people who are serving decades-long sentences for life or life without parole, but they make up only about 10 percent and 2.5 percent of the total prison population, respectively. The two-year median, meanwhile, holds true both in notoriously punitive states like Michigan and in more lenient ones like Minnesota. Not only is the absolute amount of time served low, in general, but in many states that amount remained flat over much of the 1990s.  So what is actually driving prison population growth? Admissions. Far more offenders who in the past would have received nonprison sentences are being locked up for short stints, driving up the overall population.

MYTH No. 2: Low-Level Drug Offenders Drive Prison Population Growth.
Only 20 percent of inmates in prisons (as opposed to jails) are locked up for drug offenses, compared with 50 percent for violent crimes and 20 percent for property offenses; most of the drug offenders are in prison for distribution, not possession. Twenty percent is admittedly much larger than approximately 3 percent, which was the fraction of prisoners serving time on drug charges in the 1970s. But if we were to release every prisoner currently serving time for a drug charge, our prison population would drop only from 1.6 million to 1.3 million. That’s not much of a decline, compared with the total number of people in prison in the 1970s — about 300,000.

MYTH No. 3: Technical Parole And Probation Violations Drive Prison Population Growth. … In 2005, about one-third of all people admitted to prison were on parole at the time (though not necessarily returning because of a violation). But the rate of parolees returning to prison has been stable for the last decade, suggesting that this doesn’t account for recent growth…. The number of parolees returning to prison is rising only because the number of people out on parole is rising.

MYTH No. 4: In The Past Three Decades, We’ve Newly Diverged From The Rest Of The World On Punishment. …
If we look back historically at the lockup rate for mental hospitals as well as prisons, we have only just now returned to the combined rates for both kinds of incarceration in the 1950s. In other words, we’re not locking up a greater percentage of the population so much as locking people up in prisons rather than mental hospitals.

MYTH No. 5: The Incarceration Boom Has Had No Effect On Crime Levels.
The best numbers available, controlling for a host of challenging statistical problems, suggest that the growth in prison populations contributed to up to 30 percent of the crime drop during the 1990s. … While prison has helped reduce crime, it’s not the most efficient tool we have. A dollar spent on police, for example, is 20 percent more effective than a dollar spent on prisons.

Pfaff’s Recommendation:
Given that, what’s the most cost-effective prison reform strategy? We need to stop admitting many minor offenders, even if they’re serving only short sentences. We need to focus less on high-profile drug statutes and more on the ways small-fry drug convictions cause later crimes to result in longer sentences. Once we start admitting fewer people to prison, we should shift money from prisons to police. If this seems like tinkering, rather than a sweeping fix, that’s because it is. See Myth No. 4: Reformers shouldn’t waste their breath trying to turn us into Europe.