Only a day after  John Wesley Hall’s list of linkable Fourth Amendment Supreme Court decisions, Michael O’Hear at  PrawfsBlawg provides a state by state list of early release initiatives over the past decade, what he calls the “early-release renaissance.”

Much of the new legislation is designed to encourage and reward inmates for participating in prison-based programming, which seems to reflect a renewed confidence in the capacity of offenders to achieve rehabilitation under the guidance of corrections officials.  (The extraordinary growth of drug treatment courts across the country may provide even clearer evidence of this.)  Likewise, much of the new legislation is intended to provide release opportunities for inmates who suffer from terminal illnesses or who have otherwise become seriously physically disabled.  

Such legislation seems to reflect a turn away from the indiscriminate approach to incapacitation that prevailed in the 1990s.  Finally, much of the legislation is intended to provide enhanced release opportunities for nonviolent drug offenders, which may indicate a weakening of the close association between drug crime and violent crime that seemed to develop in the public’s imagination during the crack epidemic in the 1980s.

While I suspect it’s far less a demonstration of the public’s acceptance of the concept of rehabilitation as a means of the correctional system ridding itself of the excesses of tough-on-crime legislation, we’ll take it any way it comes. 

Here is the list, broken down by state, with footnotes, because O’Hear is a lawprof and it just wouldn’t be cool without footnotes.