“South Carolina is usually the first of everything bad and last in everything good,” state Senator Gerald Malloy (D) told a local newspaper this week. But not this time on criminal justice reform. In 2010, Malloy’s bill to reduce the prison terms for nonviolent offenders while strengthening penalties for some of the worst offenders was signed into law by the state’s Republican governor, and makes the conservative state a potential leader on criminal justice reform.

The bill rejects the “tough on crime” approach that politicians think voters like in favor of a “smart on crime” approach that polls show voters increasingly actually favor. And already, it is saving the state gobs of money. In 2012 alone, the South Carolina reform saved taxpayers more than $3 million, according to a Vera Institute study. Instead of the projected 3,200-inmate increase in the prison population by 2014, the population has already decreased by 2,700 since 2010. Probation for those whose prison terms are shortened costs the state just $1,088 per year, as compared to $17,342 per year to keep someone in prison.

South Carolina was prompted to pass the bill as its Department of Corrections faced a $27 million deficit. Nationwide, state corrections spending is the fastest-growing budgetary item after Medicaid, according to a New York Times report. And while it is still early to gauge the long-term impacts of the South Carolina change, a recent report by the Pew Center on the States concludes that longer prison terms are “high cost” and “low return”:

Although few Americans would question the wisdom of tough sentences for violent, chronic offenders, most criminologists now consider the increased use of prison for non-violent offenders a questionable public expenditure, producing little additional crime control benefit for each dollar spent.

During the past decade, all 17 states that cut their imprisonment rates also experienced a decline in crime rates. And a 2006 legislative analysis in Washington State found that while incarcerating violent offenders provides a net public benefit by saving the state more than it costs, imprisonment of property and drug offenders leads to negative returns.

The report also finds that nearly 90 percent of those polled “support shortening prison terms by up to a year for low-risk, nonviolent offenders if they have behaved well in prison or completed programming.” Voters even support reinvesting prison savings in alternatives to incarceration, which is exactly what South Carolina is doing. The state is routing all of the savings back into more sentencing reform, a substantial portion of which includes better training for staff that work with the more serious, violent prisoners and a program to show inmates how their crimes hurt others.

Those released from prison early, meanwhile, are participating in probation programs that provide incentives for good behavior, rather than punishing violators with an automatic return to prison. Those without family support are assigned a counselor — a move that has already doubled the rate of juvenile offenders successfully completing probation in one South Carolina county.

Overall, early analysis of the law by the State newspaper reveals almost no negative effects, except that more of the savings need to go toward probation services. The law is rightly being viewed as a model for reform, not only to save states money, but to mitigate the U.S. epidemic of over-incarceration.

In the wake of laws in Washington and Colorado to legalize small amounts of marijuana and regulate it like alcohol, a new poll shows that 57 percent of Hawaiians favor a similar law. This is a 20 percent jump from the last time a poll was conducted in 2005. A whopping 69 percent think jail time for marijuana is inappropriate, and 78 percent support a medical marijuana dispensary system to bolster the state’s medical marijuana law. Arrests for mere possession of marijuana have increased 50 percent since 2004, and disproportionately affect people of native Hawaiian descent.

An accompanying study on the budgetary implications of passing such a law found that decriminalizing marijuana would save state and county governments $5 million per year, and that legalizing and regulating the industry would save another $5 million, in addition to generating $4 million to $20 million in new revenue. Of course, Hawaii would probably not be alone in taking up a measure to legalize marijuana. Oregon and California have already held referenda on the question, and drug policy advocates are eyeing a number of other states where political will has strengthened since November, several of which have already decriminalized possession.

On Tuesday, New York became the first state to pass gun legislation in response to the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December. The measures include bans on assault weapons and magazines that hold more than 7 bullets, and a requirement that gun owners in homes with mentally ill people must properly lock up their firearms.

Though these new laws are immensely popular among New York voters, Texas attorney general Greg Abbott (R) has extended an open invitation to any New Yorkers who feel threatened by the new gun violence protection measure. Abbott launched an Internet ad campaign targeting New Yorkers shortly after Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) signed the law.

The provocative web ads, paid for with Abbott campaign funds, will appear as a pop-up on screens on a variety of media web sites, including that of The New York Times, for those accessing the sites in Manhattan and Albany.

“Is Gov. Cuomo looking to take your guns? Sick of the media outing law abiding gun owns? Are you a lawful NY gun owner seeking lower taxes?” reads one of two pop-up ads.

A second reads: “Wanted: Law abiding New York gun owns looking for lower taxes and greater opportunity.”

Click on either and you are directed to a Facebook second amendment petition page with the greeting: “You’ll fit right in here in Texas!”

The Facebook page boasts that New Yorkers who move to Texas will be able “to keep more of what you earn and use some of that extra money to buy more ammo.”

Abbott’s campaign may not attract many New York defectors. A new poll found that 73 percent of New York voters supported the ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. A full 91 percent support stricter penalties on purchasing illegal guns or using guns on school property. Even New York’s Republican state senators supported the new laws, passing it by a margin of 43 to 18.

The Senate’s most senior member lamented the utter failure of the so-called “War on Drugs” and other draconian criminal justice policies Wednesday morning. During an address on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s 2013 agenda, Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) expressed alarm over high rates of imprisonment, harsh mandatory minimum sentences and federal crackdowns of marijuana laws legal under state law. “We have imprisoned people who should not be there and we have wasted money that should be spent on other things,” he said.

There are too many people, too many young people, too many minorities, too many from the inner city who are serving time in jail for people who might have done the same thing but have the money to stay out and are not there. What I say is if you have a youngster in the inner city buying $100 worth of cocaine for example could end up going to prison for years. If you have somebody on Wall Street buying the same 100 dollars from their local dealer, if they’re caught, they’ll be reprimanded and they may even have to do on Park Avenue a week of public service. That’s not right.

Responding to a question on the acclaimed War on Drugs documentary The House I Live In, he added:

[T]he fact that so many people, especially young people, go to prison for a relatively minor thing, a drug offense. And then you ask, why can’t they get jobs afterward? Why do they have problems from then on?

I think we have spent tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars on the so-called War on Drugs. Well, we’ve lost.

After laying out Judiciary Committee plans to effectively protect public safety by prioritizing the immediate reauthorization of the Republican-obstructed Violence Against Women Act and holding hearings on gun violence prevention, Leahy focused on those elements of the criminal justice system that send the wrong people to jail – and for too long.

“I say this as a former prosecutor … I think the reliance at the state and federal level on mandatory minimums has been a great mistake,” he said. “I’m not convinced that it has lowered crime, but I know it has imprisoned people who should not be there.”

He also advocated for national standards and oversight of forensics testing, saying, “If you have labs that do not give you right results, and you think you can close a case by sending the wrong person to prison, you’ve done nothing for the safety of people” and “you have tragedy of having an innocent person in prison.”

Responding to a question about federal enforcement of marijuana laws, Leahy reiterated his concern that federal resources are misallocated to marijuana crackdowns while murders and robberies go unsolved. “It was also my feeling as a prosecutor,” he said. “I found more important things to do.” President Obama expressed a similar sentiment recently when he told Barbara Walters the administration has “bigger fish to fry” than target marijuana users, but that has not stopped prosecutors from cracking down on medical marijuana distributors in seeming compliance with state law.

Leahy joins a number of world leaders, including Bill Clinton, who have recently blasted the failed War on Drugs approach. Mandatory minimum sentences, discriminatory crackdowns and criminalization of public health issues are all a part of the tough-on-crime system that has sent more of our own to prison than any other country, under the guise of improved public safety.

U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz

U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, who oversaw the prosecution of the late Internet activist Aaron Swartz, released a statement yesterday defending her office’s decision to pursue a long list of felony charges against Swartz for his efforts to download and make public a paid database of scholarly articles. Had Swartz received the maximum penalties for the charges he faced, he would have spent many decades in federal prison. Nevertheless, Ortiz says that her office never truly pushed for such a stiff punishment:

The career prosecutors handling this matter took on the difficult task of enforcing a law they had taken an oath to uphold, and did so reasonably. The prosecutors recognized that there was no evidence against Mr. Swartz indicating that he committed his acts for personal financial gain, and they recognized that his conduct – while a violation of the law – did not warrant the severe punishments authorized by Congress and called for by the Sentencing Guidelines in appropriate cases. That is why in the discussions with his counsel about a resolution of the case this office sought an appropriate sentence that matched the alleged conduct – a sentence that we would recommend to the judge of six months in a low security setting. While at the same time, his defense counsel would have been free to recommend a sentence of probation. Ultimately, any sentence imposed would have been up to the judge. At no time did this office ever seek – or ever tell Mr. Swartz’s attorneys that it intended to seek – maximum penalties under the law.

First of all, everyone interested in this case should read Orin Kerr’s thoughts on Ortiz’s conduct. As Kerr correctly explains, most judges follow the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, not the statutory maximum sentences, when it comes time to determine a convicted defendant’s punishment. The Guidelines called for a much shorter sentence than the 50 or more year maximum sentence Swartz theoretically could have received. Kerr estimates that Swartz would have received, at most, “a few years in jail if he went to trial.”

Nevertheless, while Ortiz’s statement that her office neither sought nor told Swartz’s legal team that they would seek a fifty year prison term may be technically true, the idea that Swartz faced decades in prison didn’t exactly spring Athena-like from the heads of liberal bloggers — it came from Ortiz’s own press release. Shortly after the indictment against Swartz was unsealed, Ortiz’s office bragged to the press that “SWARTZ faces up to 35 years in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release, restitution, forfeiture and a fine of up to $1 million” if convicted of the charges against him. The charges against Swartz were later amended to include additional counts that brought the maximum possible sentence above 50 years.

So prosecutors probably never told Swartz’s attorneys that their client faced nearly an entire lifetime behind bars. But it is impossible to imagine the dread Swartz must have felt upon reading his own name followed by the words “faces up to 35 years in prison.” A man consumed by fear that he could spend his adult life in prison is in no position to think rationally when a prosecutor — backed by the full power of the United States of America’s monopoly on the use of legitimate force — offers him the opportunity to instead be able to love and live and form a family someday if he signs on the dotted line and agrees to a much shorter jail term. There is little doubt that Ortiz knew this, or that her office did not intentionally pile charge after charge against Swartz in the hope that the full weight of them would cause him to break in a plea negotiation.

And this tactic of intimidation stretches far beyond Ortiz’s office. The sad truth is that this tactic is a common tool wielded by prosecutors — it is just more often broken out against small-time criminals with few resources and no access to the press. As Kerr notes, “[w]hat’s unusual about the Swartz case is that it involved a highly charismatic defendant with very powerful friends in a position to object to these common practices.” If Ortiz’s actions were wrong when applied to an Internet pioneer with famous friends, then they are even more wrong when applied to a minor drug offender whose only lifeline is a public defender he just met.

In Colorado, state Sen. Kent Lambert has a new bill that pressures businesses to allow permit-holding customers to carry concealed weapons. If they don’t, businesses would need to pay a security guard per 50 customers and “face increased liability.”

Lambert pointed to the Aurora movie theater shooting as reason why gun-packing customers should be part of the everyday shopping experience, adding that “[i]f businesses don’t allow people to defend themselves [the bill] puts the onus on them to provide security for their customers.”

That is not the only proposal coming out of the Colorado legislature. There is one proposal to open up schools to guns. And for the eighth year in a row, Rep. Justin Everett (R) introduced his “Make My Day Better” bill to allow work employees to use deadly force if necessary. He calls it a “pro-business bill.”

In the past, the strongest opponent of such “pro-business” bills has been business. Tennessee considered a bill, backed by the National Rifle Association, that would let employees to store guns in parking lots. Businesses, hospitals, and the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce all opposed the proposal.

In a classic Kinsley gaffe, the Republican State Leadership Committee released a report boasting that the only reason the GOP controls the House of Representatives is because they gerrymandered congressional districts in blue states.

The RSLC’s admission came in a shockingly candid report entitled, “How a Strategy of Targeting State Legislative Races in 2010 Led to a Republican U.S. House Majority in 2013″. It details how the group spent $30 million in the 2010 election cycle to sweep up low-cost state legislature races in blue states like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Their efforts were so successful, in fact, that Republicans went from controlling both legislative chambers in 14 states before Election Day to 25 states afterward.

In turn, the new Republican majorities would be tasked with redrawing congressional districts for the 2012 election. “The rationale was straightforward,” the report reads. “Controlling the redistricting process in these states would have the greatest impact on determining how both state legislative and congressional district boundaries would be drawn.”

This effort paid off in spades. As the RSLC’s report concedes (and ThinkProgress has documented extensively), a majority of Americans voted for Democratic congressional candidates on Election Day, but only through the miracle of gerrymandering did Republicans wind up controlling the House. From the report:

Farther down-ballot, aggregated numbers show voters pulled the lever for Republicans only 49 percent of the time in congressional races, suggesting that 2012 could have been a repeat of 2008, when voters gave control of the White House and both chambers of Congress to Democrats.

But, as we see today, that was not the case. Instead, Republicans enjoy a 33-seat margin in the U.S. House seated yesterday in the 113th Congress, having endured Democratic successes atop the ticket and over one million more votes cast for Democratic House candidates than Republicans. The only analogous election in recent political history in which this aberration has taken place was immediately after reapportionment in 1972, when Democrats held a 50 seat majority in the U.S. House of Representatives while losing the presidency and the popular congressional vote by 2.6 million votes.

The report credits gerrymandered maps in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin with allowing Republicans to overcome a 1.1 million popular-vote deficit. In Ohio, for instance, Republicans won 12 out of 16 House races “despite voters casting only 52 percent of their vote for Republican congressional candidates.” The situation was even more egregious to the north. “Michiganders cast over 240,000 more votes for Democratic congressional candidates than Republicans, but still elected a 9-5 Republican delegation to Congress.”

Though party officials typically dance around the unseemly issue of gerrymandering, this report is surprisingly candid and unabashed. The RSLC, after all, is tasked with winning control of state legislatures in large part so they can redraw congressional maps to the GOP’s benefit after redistricting. Because most states allow partisan redistricting, its understandable that the RSLC would release a report boasting of its gerrymandering success that “paved the way to Republicans retaining a U.S. House majority in 2012.”