Santa Clara University School of Law Professor W. David Ball is the feature of a new article on Slate. The article, “How to Stop Overzealous Prosecutors,” reviews a recent article published by Prof. Ball about his recommendation to place the burden of costs on the county where the prosecutor holds office instead of the state.
The “correctional free lunch” problem has been with us for decades; it was first named in a 1991 book called The Scale of Imprisonment by Frank Zimring and Gordon Hawkins. Now, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law has come forward with a new idea for how to fix it.
W. David Ball’s proposal begins with defunding state prisons, and making the counties pay for every inmate they incarcerate. In a recent paper, Ball argues that states should take the money they’re currently spending on their prison systems, distribute it among counties based on their violent crime rate, and allow local decision-makers to spend it as they see fit. If county officials want to use the money to fund crime prevention programs, they can; if they want to use it to put lots of convicted felons in prison, they can do that too….
As Ball writes in his paper that, under the existing system, “counties that choose to use state prison to address crime are, in essence, subsidized by counties that choose local programs such as probation and treatment instead,” since the state typically pays for the former, while the county pays for the latter.
