On July 15, the Times-News reprinted an attack on Idaho’s prosecutors written by the Lewiston Tribune. Almost everything the Tribune wrote was wrong. We need to set the record straight. The Tribune editorial argues that Idaho is “spending a lot of money locking up people for their first drug offense.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Idaho judges, prosecutors and law enforcement are putting the right people in prison—and the statistics prove it.
The Tribune piece starts with grossly inaccurate, and now discredited, statistics about Idaho’s prison population made public by Idaho Department of Corrections Director Henry Atencio before the legislature’s Criminal Justice Reinvestment Oversight Committee on July 10. Atencio said Idaho has 1245 “drug offenders” in its prison system, 40.6 percent of those, had “no prior felony convictions.” The Tribune quotes Atencio as saying that 52.8 percent of Idaho’s prison inmates are there for drug convictions. The insinuation is that these people are wrongly imprisoned.
But the numbers Atencio provided, and the analysis the Tribune applied to them, are both dramatically and provably wrong. Prosecutors and law enforcement officials around the state immediately recognized these numbers were wrong, so we dived into the individual case files to get the actual facts.
First, some basic math. It’s true that 1245 inmates in Idaho’s prison are there for drug offenses. But, because there are 6754 people in Idaho prisons, the percentage is 18.43 percent, not the fantastical 52.8 percent that appears in the Tribune editorial.
However, even that doesn’t tell the full story. Of the 1245 incarcerated for drug offenses an examination undertaken by prosecutors of the individual case files show 258 are there for manufacturing, distributing and trafficking in the most dangerous drugs, not for simple possession. Further, Director Atencio admits that 742 of the remaining 987 have prior felony convictions. This leaves only 245 inmates, not 1245, alleged by IDOC to be “first-time offenders” whose only crime is the mere possession of illegal drugs. Read more here.
MagicValley.com