Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares has used his post to advocate against some Democratic criminal justice reform efforts, including reforms pitched in the budget. But advocates say his criticisms are based on bad data and the reforms he’s blocking could save the Commonwealth millions of dollars.
Just before the Virginia legislature broke into conference to form a compromise budget between chambers, Miyares sent a letter to the body hoping to do something his conservative legislative counterparts failed to do: limit earned sentence credits.
Earned sentence credits allow incarcerated folks to get released early after participating in training and education programs that advocates say will help them once they get out. An effort to expand the system was passed in 2020 but Governor Glenn Youngkin put language blocking the change in the 2022 budget. In the letter to legislators sent this session, Miyares said quote “Aggressive sentence reductions for violent criminals and those with high risk for recidivism disregards past and future victims,” and suggested thousands of those released under the program had been rearrested or convicted.
But according to ACLU of Virginia’s Shawn Weneta, Miyares used bad numbers in his assessment. He pointed to a letter responding to the AG's complaints by the pro-criminal justice reform group the Humanization Project which dinged Miyares' letter point by point.
Weneta instead suggested the program can reduce recidivism, and, perhaps more importantly during a contentious budget cycle, it could save the commonwealth as much as $118 million by releasing early those who qualify.
“We cite earmarking the hundreds of millions of dollars that could be saved for implementing this program like the legislature intended,” Weneta told Radio IQ.
Further placing their thumb on the scales is Democratic House Speaker Don Scott, who spent over 7 years in federal prison. Scott authored the expanded earned sentence credit system back in 2020. And one of the Senate budget conferees, Fairfax County Senator Jennifer Boysko, patroned the senate version of Scott’s expanded earned sentence credit in 2020.
That may bode well for language expanding the program in 2024, but it’ll have to get the okay from Youngkin as well.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
