The latest victim of financial crisis: U.S. jails
CARSON CITY, Nevada: For nearly three decades, most U.S. states have dealt with lawbreakers in two ways: Lock more of them up for longer periods, and build more prisons to hold them. Now many governments, out of money and buried under mounting prison costs, are reversing many of those policies and practices.
Some states, like Colorado and Nevada, are closing prisons. Others, like Kansas and New Jersey, have replaced jail time with community programs or other sanctions for people who violate parole. Kentucky lawmakers passed a bill this month that enhances the credits some inmates can earn toward release.
Michigan is doing a little of all of this, in addition to freeing some offenders who have yet to serve their maximum sentence, previously anathema. And on Wednesday, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a Democrat, signed legislation to repeal the state's death penalty, which aside from ethical concerns was seen as costly.
Being tough on crime and sentencing has long been the clear path toward job retention for state lawmakers — Republicans and Democrats alike. But the economic crisis is forcing them to take a more pragmatic approach and view prisoners as a budget expense that must be reined in.
"When state budgets are flush," said Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, "prisons are something that governors and legislators all support, and they don't want to touch sentencing reform. But when dollars are as tight as they are now, you have to make really tough choices. And so now things are in play."
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Recessions tend to prompt changes to corrections policies. After the recession at the start of this decade, numerous states passed laws eliminating some long mandatory minimum sentences; several began to offer early release and treatment options to some drug offenders. Those changes, though, were far less reaching than what is happening now and did little to curb exploding corrections budgets.
Over the past 20 years, correction department budgets have quadrupled and now are outpacing every major spending area outside of health care, according to a recent report by the Pew Center on the States. With 73 million Americans in prison, on parole or under probation, states spent $47 billion in 2008, the study said.
Faced with such costs, even states known for being particularly tough on crime are revisiting their policies and laws.
"In Kentucky, our prison budget is approaching half a billion dollars," said J. Michael Brown, secretary of the State Justice and Public Safety Cabinet. "And as dollars get scarce, it forces a tremendous amount of scrutiny."
The most pervasive trend among corrections departments has been to look closely at parole systems, in which it is no longer cost-effective to monitor released inmates, largely because too many violate their terms, often on technicalities, and end up back in crowded prisons. In California, among the few states to mandate parole for all convicts, parole violators — not new offenders — account for the largest percentage of inmates entering the system.
New Jersey recently began a program for some offenders on parole with technical violations, like failing to report to a parole officer or changing their address without the officer's approval. Rather than being returned to jail, those former inmates are sent to a center for a clinical assessment of their risks and needs. With that change, the state stands to save $16.2 million by the time the fiscal year ends on June 30.
Other states are shortening lengths of parole, or even sentences, to save money.
In Kentucky, Gov. Steven L. Beshear, a Democrat, is about to sign a bill that makes permanent a pilot program that offers qualifying inmates credit for time served on parole against sentence dates, in part to avoid a pattern of inmates choosing to stay in prison rather than risking later parole violations. The state has also adopted a program that gives treatment rather than jail time to select drug offenders, which some lawmakers had sought for years.
In California, where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has called for $400 million to be cut from the state's corrections budget, officials are seeking to remove low-level drug offenders from the parole supervision system and to provide them treatment options instead.
Like other states making such changes, California is led by a governor who long opposed such shifts in prison policies. But Mr. Schwarzenegger, as well as other leaders and lawmakers who are far more conservative, have come around to a view held by advocates of sentencing and prison reform that longer sentences do little to reduce recidivism among certain nonviolent criminals.