By C1 Staff
LINCOLN, Neb. — The Omaha police chief told state lawmakers Wednesday that reducing re-offender rates should be a higher priority than reducing prison overcrowding.
Chief Todd Schmaderer testified before the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee in support of two bills that he said would ultimately make it harder for inmates to “jam out,” or exit prison without a period of parole supervision, according to The Omaha.
One of the bills would replace an automatic system of good time with an alternative requiring inmates to earn sentence reductions by completing educational, vocational and treatment programs.
The other would require violent offenders to be electronically monitored upon release.
The case of Nikko Jenkins, who killed four people after his 2013 release from a Nebraska prison, has focused attention on good time. Critics say that correctional officials failed to revoke his good time after several reports of misconduct.
Several committee members indicated that they wouldn’t vote to advance the earned-time measure, citing that the DOC lacks the kind of programming the inmates would need to complete to earn such sentence reductions.
Schmaderer said rehabilitating inmates is critical to reducing re-offense rates and said an earned-time system could provide more incentive for inmates to participate. Without such incentives, they just ‘jam out.’
He continued to say that good time is simply not working and that “it’s plated out across this state with offenders re-offending.”
One opposition to the earned-time measure was cited by Sen. Ernie Chambers, who said that it’s been tried in the past and failed, largely because officials awarded the time arbitrarily.
Chambers said that good time is intended to be a prison management tool to increase safety by improving inmate behavior.
The committee was more in favor of the second bill requiring violent offenders to be electronically monitored for at least 90 days after release. The program would be administered by the Parole Office.
The chief of staff for Omaha Mayor Jean Stohert, Marty Bilek, said that 1,006 inmates were released in 2013 without any form of supervision, and argued that such inmates were set up for failure.