Criminal justice reform: legislative committee hearings

This came to me through the grapevine today...if you're an Arizona voter, please act.

-----From Arizona State Representative Cecil Ash----

Friends of Criminal Justice Reform:

Presently I have several bills waiting to be heard by the MAPS Committee (Military Affairs and Public Safety) The committee chairman is Representative David Gowan from District 30.  

The Chairman of a committee has the power to decide whether or not a bill will be heard in his committee.  If a chairman does not calendar a bill, it will die in committee and never even be heard by our representatives to decide the merits of a given bill for themselves.   Gowan will need to decide in the next few days whether or not to hear these bills which have been assigned to his committee:

HB2521 pertains to earned release credits.  Currently, the director of the department may grant early release on the ratio of one day for every seven days served  - regardless of whether the offense is violent or nonviolent, no one can get released earlier than 85% of their sentence even if they are a model prisoner.  This bill would offer a highly motivating incentive for inmates convicted of a nonviolent offense to stay out of trouble and participate in rehabilitative programs, by giving them a release credit of one day for every three days served instead of one day for every 7 days. This would not apply to prisoners convicted of serious, violent or aggravated felonies as defined in Sec. 13-706.     

      The Arizona Auditor General estimates that such a change could result in significant cost savings for taxpayers: For every day that an inmate spends on community supervision (parole) rather than prison, the State would save an estimated $4.62, which represents the difference between the daily marginal cost of housing an inmate in a state-operated prison compared to supervising an inmate on parole in fiscal year 2009.

HB2522   pertains to prescriptive sentencing.   As many of you know, one of the policies driving our high incarceration rate is mandatory sentencing — laws that remove a judge’s ability to hand down an appropriate sentence, and instead obligate a one-size-fits-all approach.  The current prescriptive sentencing provisions have led to many unduly harsh and lengthy sentences which are an affront to what is fair and just.  The purpose of this bill is to simplify the sentencing statutes by eliminating the strict intermediate prescriptive categories of sentencing, leaving the “mitigating” category as the minimum sentence, and leaving the “aggravated” category as the maximum sentence.  This would broaden the range of of sentencing options available to the judges and give them a "safety valve," so that they could more appropriately fit the sentence to the severity of the crime instead of being cornered by a technicality that results in a breach of justice.  It is important to note that this modification would NOT stop judges from applying the more severe mandatory or prescriptive provisions where appropriate,

HB2523 eliminates the $25 background check required for visitors to inmates in the Arizona Department of Corrections.

HB2531 allows the director of the Department of Correction to parole inmates whose physical disabilities have incapacitated them, so that they are no longer a threat to the safety of the public.

PLEASE email Rep. Gowan, the committee chair, and ask him to give these bills a hearing.  If any of the other members of the committee are your  representatives, please contact them as well and identify yourself as a constituent from their district. 

(DO NOT FORWARD THIS EMAIL TO A STATE REPRESENTATIVE OR SENATOR, but create your own email with your own reasons and your own story for supporting the bills that you choose to support)

The deadline for bills to be heard in their assigned committees is February 17^th.  After that, if a bill has not passed out of its committees, it is dead.  These bills have been assigned to multiple committees, making it even harder to get them through the process, so time is of the essence.  

PLEASE CALL or EMAIL TODAY.

David Gowan District 30, Chair  dgowan@azleg.gov 

Terri Proud District 26, Vice Chair   tproud@azleg.gov

Jeff Dial District 20  jdial@azleg.gov

Ruben Gallego District 16   rgallego@azleg.gov

Albert Hale District 2  ahale@azleg.gov

Jack W. Harper District 4   jharper@azleg.gov

Richard Miranda District 13 rmiranda@azleg.gov

David Burnell Smith District 7   dsmith@azleg.gov

David Stevens District 25  dstevens@azleg.gov

Thank you for your help!

Sincerely,

Cecil Ash

State Representative

Legislative District 18

AZ House of Representatives

1700 W. Washington, H-313
Phoenix, Arizona 85007

602-926-3160, cash@azleg.gov