At our meeting of November 20, 2019, Brian Panella introduced Bob Eyers as this morning’s speaker. Mr. Eyers is a graduate of Dickerson School of Law and was a law clerk with Judge Hogan. During 25 years Bob has moved through several positions through his career including working in the Northampton County DAs office, the Public Defenders office, Chief Law Clerk for Superior Court Judge Freedberg, worked for Judges Panella and Smith and working in private practice. Based on his experience Bob has become an expert in criminal law. Using this extensive criminal law and litigation experience he is now with Goudsozian & Associates.
Bob’s topic this morning is changes in the criminal justice system in Pennsylvania. Through the years national political swings have dictated different criminal justice thinking and policy from more retaliation to more incarceration and everything in between. The period from 1940 to 1980 the average population in our state prisons was 5000 to 7000. Currently, the population in our state prisons is around 55,000. Today Pennsylvania is second to Texas in the number of people incarcerated in prison. Has the crime rate dropped by this high rate of incarceration? Many feel that it hasn’t and therefore the pendulum has begun to swing toward the middle. Bob sees candidates for District Attorney in parts of the state running on a platform of getting people out of jail. One example is the new DA for Philadelphia who wants to take the progressive criminal justice path of getting people out of jail and sentencing fewer felons to jail. So we have a span going from “sociologisting” the way out of the problem to locking people up. In Northampton County Bob sees us moving more to the middle by doing something different than just locking people up. Since the sentencing guidelines are developed by the state legislature there is movement in making changes at the request of the Governor. They are looking at ways to get people out quicker by doing a better job of getting them ready to rejoin society so they can become productive members versus again getting in trouble and going back.
About 20% of the inmates in county jails are people who have not been convicted of a crime but are there because they can not afford to pay the bail that has been set by the court. Bob feels that many of them are in there because of a low level crime and are not a hazard to the public. What could be done is a process of doing a risk assessment of the person to see if it is safe to release the person. Putting people on probation versus jail is another tool that could be used to keep convicted felons of low-level crimes out of jail and if they violate their probation they would be sentenced to spending time in jail. The amount of time is another topic of reform discussion.
Bob indicated there is another tool to look at which is expungement of a crime from the record. These are for minor non-violent crimes. For example, someone committed a crime when he or she was young and after many years that person is looking for a job and because the crime is on the record could not get that job. Reform in this area is being considered where the state police after so many years would go in and erase the crime from the record.