Pew: Changes are reducing Philly’s prison population

A report released Wednesday credited changes in the criminal justice system with dramatically reducing the number of inmates in the Philadelphia prison system, but said the city must drive down the population even further to reach the goal of closing one of its jails.

From a peak of nearly 10,000 inmates in January 2009, the population in the city's six jails has dwindled to 8,200 - and dropped below 7,700 in the spring.

The biggest reasons are fewer inmates being held before trial and fewer held for violations of parole or probation, according to the report, from the Pew Charitable Trusts' Philadelphia Research Initiative.

"Everyone understands we're not trying to lock everyone up, but lock up the right people," Deputy Mayor Everett Gillison said. "The jail should not be at 10,000, and I think we're proving that with a little collaboration we can push those numbers down."

Gillison said he hoped to shrink the number of inmates by an additional 500 to 700 through the use of electronic monitoring devices and by starting day reporting centers for nonviolent offenders. The Pew report also called for day reporting centers, which would offer job training, drug testing, and counseling.

But efforts in 2009 and 2010 to open the city's first center in a mothballed factory in Southwest Philadelphia caused a neighborhood uprising. Gillison said he realized he must overcome the "not in my backyard" sentiment of residents.

Most likely, he'll have to convince the public if the city is going to drive the prison population down to 6,500. At that point, he said, the city could demolish its oldest jail, the House of Correction on State Road, built in 1927, without jeopardizing public safety.

Because most jail costs are fixed, the Pew report said, the savings from the population drop have been relatively small. The system's $231 million budget is just $10 million lower than when there were nearly 10,000 inmates.

Only canceling a contract or closing a jail would bring significant savings, the report said.

The report focused on the inmate drop in 2010 and cited policy changes initiated by District Attorney Seth Williams, who took office that January, for aiding the decline.

In a statement, Williams said the report "illustrates the great strides this office along with our criminal justice partners have made in the past year and a half."

"Together we have simultaneously improved public safety and reduced the size of the county prison population, and proved that the two are not mutually exclusive," he said.

Nearly half the recent population drop came from inmates awaiting trial. The report said two major policy changes were behind this decline - a change in the way prosecutors charge crimes and the expansion of diversion programs, such as the district attorney's program to deal with people arrested with small amounts of marijuana.

In an effort to increase convictions, Williams has directed his prosecutors to charge defendants only with crimes they believe can be proved in court, even if that means charging them with less serious offenses.

"As defendants are being charged with lesser offenses, the likelihood is that fewer are being held on bail," the Pew report said.

The report also said fewer people were being held before trial because of a slight decline in arrests in 2010 that coincided with a drop in violent crime, as well as fewer arrests for missing court appearances - partly due to a computer glitch that delayed the uploading of warrant data to police databases.

The number of inmates held for violations of probation or parole has fallen mostly because of a collaboration among the courts, the District Attorney's Office, and the Defenders Association to make the courts more efficient.

Violators spent an average of five fewer days in jail in 2010 than in 2009, the report said.

Twelve percent of the drop came from the continuing effects of a 2008 change in state law that required some inmates to serve their sentences in state facilities, the report found.