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Legislation pendiing before the House would limit community-control use
KEITH ARNOLD
Special to the Legal News
Published: April 19, 2024
Legislation pending before the Criminal Justice Committee of the Ohio House of Representatives seeks to optimize community control of non-jailed offenders, according to the bill’s sponsors.
According to Cincinnati Rep. Bill Seitz, one of two Republican sponsors of House Bill 196, judges currently have broad sentencing discretion with regard to community control, resulting in different outcomes mostly dependent on the county in which a defendant is sentenced.
“This means that the same charge in different counties can have vastly different consequences, such as some offenders finding themselves facing a much longer community control sentence than an offender of a similar crime in a different county,” Seitz said during an initial hearing of the bill.
HB 196 would limit community-control sanctions, including any period of period of supervised community-service work, imposed on a felony offender to five years for any first- or second-degree felony, three years for any third-degree felony and two years for any fourth- or fifth-degree felony.
Current law allows for a maximum community-control sanction of five years for all felonies, according to analysis of the bill by the Ohio Legislative Service Commission.
“To be clear, the objective of this legislation is not to diminish the use of community control. It is to provide better community control,” Seitz said. “Having someone on community control for five years and doing a poor job of supervising them, is going to lead to a worse outcome than having someone on community control for one-to-three years and tailoring the type of supervision to the inmate’s risk profile.”
For misdemeanor offenses, community-control sanctions would be limited to a maximum sentence of two years, according to the bill.
Rep. Josh Williams of Sylvania Township told committee members that he and Seitz worked with community stakeholders to create the revised structure and procedures for the administration of community control.
The proposed changes will relieve the burden of community control on low-level offenders, “allowing them the chance to reintegrate sooner and more easily if the court deems that the criteria of their community control sentence has been met,” Williams said.
“These (current) long sentences are a burden to the tax-payer and the resources of our correctional system,” he continued. “This issue is compounded by the fact that the longer an offender is on community control, the more likely they are to commit a technical violation, thereby increasing their time on community control or in jail, putting their job and reintegration into society needlessly at risk.”
He noted that technical violations are procedural in nature and are neither crimes nor willful non-compliance with a community-control order.
HB 196 would expand application of technical violations to all felonies, instead of only fourth- and fifth-degree felonies that are non-violent and non-sexually oriented.
Williams said the bill would allow for flexible community-control term limits individualized to the offender with the creation of a mandatory judicial review at two years for third-, fourth- and fifth-degree felony offenders who may be candidates for early termination unless the court finds that early termination would present a risk of danger to the victim or the community.
“We believe that the changes to community control described in this legislation will improve the administration of community control in our state by reducing unnecessary incarcerations and lengthy community control terms for certain low-risk offenders,” Williams said.
Four House members co-sponsor the bill.
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