By C1 Staff
UNITED STATES — A new study released by The Pew Charitable Trusts is giving an interesting look into how many inmates serve their sentences throughout the U.S. – with Florida in the lead and Oregon bringing up the rear.
CBS News reports that Florida leads the nation in inmates who ‘max out’ their sentences – inmates who serve 100 percent of their time and leave prison without any sort of supervision or support beyond the prison gates.
Maine and North Carolina followed up behind Florida, but the Sunshine State was most concerning. They released 21,426 prisoners in 2012 alone.
“You can go in Florida from solitary confinement to the street, and that’s probably not a good thing,” said Allison Defoor, chairman of the Project on Accountable Justice at Florida State University and a former Monroe County sheriff and judge.
“I’ve had plenty of clients, when I was a criminal defense attorney, say ‘I’ll take more time and no paper, thank you very much.’ And they were the seasoned ones, the ones who really knew the system.”
The data reads differently for Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, president of the Florida Sheriffs Association.
“We should celebrate that we don’t have parole and crime is at a 43-year low. When we had a parole system in Florida where we watched out for people upon their release from prison, they didn’t stay in prison as long, and our crime rate was through the roof.”
On the opposite end of the scale, inmates in Oregon are serving the least amount of time and are also being released without supervision, according to Oregon Live.
The Oregon prison system’s rate measured at 0.4 percent ‘max outs,’ followed by California and Arkansas.