In Kentucky, all sides agree on need for criminal justice reform. But how?

FRANKFORT AND HAZARD, KY.—In 2009, both Tahiesha Howard and the state of Kentucky were looking for a fresh start.

Ms. Howard’s childhood was such a blur of dysfunction and addiction she says she couldn’t remember her first drink of alcohol. By her 30s, one judge labeled the mother a “menace to society.”

Kentucky, meanwhile, had become a poster child for ineffective and unsustainable mass incarceration – its prison system growing at quadruple the national average despite a consistently low crime rate.

Howard bought a one-way ticket to Louisville and began trying to conquer a drug addiction. Two years later, the Kentucky legislature passed a landmark law aimed at lowering the state’s prison population. For several years, things went well, for Howard and Kentucky. The inmate population dropped, while Howard stayed clean. She completed an in-patient drug treatment program, found a $16-an-hour job, and was saving to buy a house.

Then, as Howard describes it, “stuff happened” – and not just for her. She relapsed, losing her job and her home – eventually returning to the same treatment center she’d graduated from in 2011. Meanwhile, Kentucky struggled in the grip of the opioid crisis. Desperate to respond, the state legislature toughened sentences on heroin and fentanyl trafficking. For this and other reasons, experts in the state say, the prison population began to explode. Again.

After decades of tough-on-crime policies that swelled prison populations, the US justice system has been recalibrating. Since 2007, 35 states have reformed their sentencing and corrections policies, according to Pew, and states like Kentucky have been at the forefront.

The process has been slow and difficult in the Bluegrass State, however. The notion that more prisons don’t equal less crime now taking hold around the country is already firmly in place here. From prosecutors and public defenders to judges, legislators, and the conservative governor, nobody wants to build more prisons. But getting all those stakeholders to agree on what to do instead is proving just as challenging…

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