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Breihan, an attorney, is the co-director of the ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ office of the , a national nonprofit that advocates for criminal justice reform. The center is involved in filing lawsuits protecting civil rights of defendants, including two important cases pending in Missouri. One of those cases seeks to force better funding of the state’s public defender system; the other challenges how the state applies parole in some cases without enough due process.

The statute she came across is the one that created the in 2003. The commission, a national model for a while, used data from the Department of Corrections to develop recommended sentences based on offense, circumstances, and what judges in various parts of Missouri had been issuing in similar cases.

It was developed somewhat as an antidote to a state prison population above 30,000 and rising and corrections costs that were eating an increasingly large amount of the state budget.

What a great idea, Breihan thought, knowing from some of the cases she’s been involved in how disparate sentences can be in different parts of the state for seemingly similar crimes. So why, she asked on Twitter after perusing the commission’s website, hadn’t it met or produced any reports since 2016?

“It just dried up,� says retired Boone County Circuit Judge Gary Oxenhandler. Oxenhandler was the second chairman of the commission, following former Missouri Supreme Court Judge Michael Wolff. I called both judges after seeing Breihan’s tweet and wondering what happened to the commission.

For a few years the commission produced reports and gave judges recommendations, but then some judges, and many prosecutors, started pushing back. Prosecutors, in particular, didn’t like it when a recommended sentence was lower than what they wanted a judge to impose.

“The prosecutors didn’t like all that information getting out,� Oxenhandler said. One of the things the commission’s reports used to do, and could do again, is explain what various sentences, or alternatives to traditional sentencing, could cost taxpayers.

In 2012, prosecutors convinced the Missouri Legislature to amend the law and get rid of the part that recommended sentences. Over time, the commission stopped producing annual reports.

“I was surprised that it was dormant,� Breihan told me. “This would be great information to have. You would think that our courts would like to make evidence-based decisions.�

The good news is that Breihan is going to get her wish. Increasingly in the past few years, both the Missouri Supreme Court and the Missouri Legislature have found themselves focused on various criminal justice reform ideas, from over-policing traffic cases to produce municipal revenue, to extracting jail board bills from poor people, to finding ways of reducing crowding in prisons. The efforts are working.

Prison populations in Missouri have dropped in each of the past several years, from a total of more than 32,000 in 2018, to 30,191 in 2019, to 25,891 in 2020. In January of this year, the count was 23,031. One of the reasons for the drop is the started by the Department of Corrections in 2018. It seeks to reduce recidivism and provide support for people involved in the justice system once they are released from prison. Oxenhandler, as a retired judge, has sat on a variety of court commissions studying various reforms, and nearly every one of them, he says, could benefit from the data that used to be produced by the sentencing commission.

So last year, the state appointed Supreme Court Judge W. Brent Powell to lead the commission, and he is working with other judges and the Department of Corrections to re-start it. “Rejuvenating the Missouri Sentencing Advisory Commission will enhance the ongoing efforts of Missouri’s Justice Reinvestment Initiative and the Supreme Court of Missouri’s criminal justice task force to improve public safety and criminal justice outcomes in our state,� Powell said.

It will also provide insight into “what sentencing practices are effective and what practices are not,� Powell added.

Reducing Missouri’s prison population by nearly 10,000 people in three years is a huge step forward. Bringing back the sentencing commission’s yearly reports can only help to keep the trend heading in the right direction.

Breihan is used to representing people who were sent to prison on extreme sentences long ago that are doing “nothing to improve public safety,� she says. “If we have an opportunity to make more informed decisions about who we send to prison and for how long, why wouldn’t we?�