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Prison Terms For Convicted Burglars And Thieves Slashed With New Law

Last updated on Friday, December 13, 2013

(UNDATED) - Prison terms for convicted burglars and thieves will be drastically slashed should the revised Indiana Criminal Code go into effect unchanged.

The current minimum for a standard residential burglary is three to 10 years of actual time served, but the changes cut the minimum to just one and a half years.

The state legislature adopted the revisions - many of them controversial - in the 2013 session.

But they delayed implementation until July 2014, time needed, legislators says, to fine-tune the changes.

The advisory sentence of five actual years is cut to three. Prosecutors across the state are working to raise community awareness regarding the drastically decreased penalties for many crimes, and the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council has been working to craft changes prosecutors want to see.

Because burglary and theft are such pervasive problems, prosecutors and law enforcement officers say reducing penalties for those crimes will inevitably result in an increase in cases. They also added that victims of burglaries and thefts are traumatized, sometimes to a debilitating degree and the reduction in the sentences is not fair to the victims.

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