Explainer: The Significance of Pennsylvania’s Justice Reinvestment Bills

2. What does this legislation mean for Pennsylvania residents?

In the long term, Pennsylvania’s criminal justice reforms will make communities safer, save millions, and improve the lives of people. Three immediate changes that will have more immediate and measurable effects include:

A new advisory committee will improve county-run probation to reduce recidivism.
Senate Bill (SB) 500 forms a probation advisory committee for county-run probation systems across 65 counties. The new committee, within the Commission on Crime and Delinquency, will provide state funding for county-run probation, promote effective supervision approaches, and facilitate data collection and analysis. SB 500 also created a new Justice Reinvestment fund to accumulate and reinvest savings realized from policies in SB 501. The state’s previous Justice Reinvestment fund, stemming from a first round of JRI in 2012, accumulated almost $25 million (out of $96 million in total savings) for reinvestment in priorities such as policing, victim services, and reentry.

More people will receive substance addiction treatment in lieu of incarceration.
SB 501 creates a more efficient process to admit people convicted of nonviolent offenses who have substance addictions into the State Drug Treatment program. This program allows people to serve most of their sentences in treatment centers as opposed to prison, which is less expensive for taxpayers and more effective at reducing recidivism.

More sentencing practices will be evidence-based.
Under SB 501, the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing will now update the state’s sentencing guidelines to promote reductions in unnecessarily long supervision terms, enabling probation and parole officers to focus their time on people who are at a high risk of reoffending.

3. How was the legislation developed?

Pennsylvania successfully used a JRI approach in 2012 to improve reentry and create the first Justice Reinvestment fund in the state. In 2015, the state embarked on a second round of JRI to build on prior efforts and address new challenges related to costs, supervision, and recidivism with intensive technical assistance from the CSG Justice Center and support from The Pew Charitable Trusts and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance. The Pennsylvania Justice Reinvestment Working Group—which included stakeholders from all three branches of government—worked with CSG Justice Center staff to review analyses and develop policy options, which are reflected in the legislation.

4. What’s next for Justice Reinvestment in Pennsylvania?

A third piece of Justice Reinvestment legislation—SB 502—remains to be enacted. This bill amends the Crime Victims Act to expand victim compensation eligibility and expenditures and ensure that the victim advocate has the proper authority to provide notifications to victims.

Under current law, probation fees are collected locally; half the money is then sent to the state before being returned to counties a few months later. The proposed legislation (SB 502) would rectify this inefficient process by no longer requiring counties to forward collected probation fees to the state.

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Learn more about SB 500 and 501 in the Pennsylvania Capital-Star and read the criminal justice system analysis presentations, which CSG Justice Center staff presented to the Pennsylvania Justice Reinvestment Initiative working group in 2016.