TW: Not really the way I would prefer our prison systems to reform but better than no reform. After three decades of profligacy related to the expansion of our prison networks, the fiscal crisis is forcing states to re-examine a cost center that is growing faster than all other government programs save health care. At roughly $35K per person per year, governments are figuring out that throwing as many folks as possible into prison may not be a viable long-term solution.
As a multi deca-billion $ annual expenditure, prisons have become big business with local governments fighting to keep what is now the functional equivalent of patronage employment. I suspect prison spending is yet another one of those sacred cows conservatives would like to continue to fund at least as aggressively as the recent past if not even more. Regardless even some of the bastions of lock um up and throw away the key are moving toward reforms. We need penal reform sooner rather than later, our current system is yet another example of a politically expedient process which is neither efficient nor effective.
From NYT:
" For nearly three decades, most 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 those policies and practices.
Some states, like Colorado and Kansas, are closing prisons. Others, like 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.
...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 as prisoners are increasingly seen less as indistinct wrongdoers and more as expenses 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.”
...In the past 20 years, correction department budgets have quadrupled and are outpacing every major spending area outside health care, according to a recent report by the Pew Center on the States. With 7.3 million Americans in prison, on parole or under probation, states spent $47 billion in 2008, the study said.
...The annual cost to keep someone in prison varies by state, and the type of institution, but the typical cost cited by states is about $35,000.
...Mr. Schwarzenegger, as well as other leaders and lawmakers who are far more conservative, has 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.
“In California we are out of room and we’re out of money,” said the state’s corrections secretary, Matthew Cate. “It may be time to take some of these steps that we should have taken long ago.”
...Here in Carson City [NV] the state estimates it would save $18 million a year by closing the prison. But the idea has rattled employees, some of whom have followed their parents’ career paths, and the community, which considers the prison a provider of jobs and an important piece of Nevada history.
...“As the economy has worsened, prisons are the modern-day factory in our rural areas,” said Russ Marlan, a spokesman for the Michigan Corrections Department. “We built these prisons in the 1980s, and people were adamantly opposed to having them in their communities. Now we go and try to take them out, and they don’t want them gone.”
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