David Crary, AP, January 10, 2009
Their budgets in crisis, governors, legislators and prison officials across the nation are making or considering policy changes that will likely remove tens of thousands of offenders from prisons and parole supervision.
Collectively, the pending and proposed initiatives could add up to one of biggest shifts ever in corrections policy, putting into place cost-saving reforms that have struggled to win political support in the tough-on-crime climate of recent decades.
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In California, faced with a projected $42 billion deficit and prison overcrowding that has triggered a federal lawsuit, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to eliminate parole for all offenders not convicted of violent or sex-related crimes, reducing the parole population by about 70,000. He also wants to divert more petty criminals to county jails and grant early release to more inmates—steps that could trim the prison population by 15,000 over the next 18 months.
In Kentucky, where the inmate population had been soaring, even some murderers and other violent offenders are benefiting from a temporary cost-saving program that has granted early release to nearly 2,000 inmates.
Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine is proposing early release of about 1,000 inmates. New York Gov. David Paterson wants early release for 1,600 inmates as well as an overhaul of the so-called Rockefeller Drug Laws that impose lengthy mandatory sentences on many nonviolent drug offenders.
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Policy-makers in Michigan, one of four states that spend more money on prisons than higher education, are awaiting a report later this month from the Council of State Governments’ Justice Center on ways to trim fast-rising corrections costs, likely including sentencing and parole modifications.
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Even before the recent financial meltdown, policy-makers in most states were wrestling with ways to contain corrections costs. The Pew Center’s Public Safety Performance Project has projected that state and federal prison populations—under current policies—will grow by more than 190,000 by 2011, to about 1.7 million, at a cost to the states of $27.5 billion.
“Prisons are becoming less and less of a sacred cow,” said Adam Gelb, the Pew project’s director. “The budget crisis is giving leaders on both sides of the aisle political cover they need to tackle issues that would be too tough to tackle when budgets are flush.”
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Thomas Sneddon, a former Santa Barbara, Calif., prosecutor who is now executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, said he and his colleagues support reappraisals of corrections policies yet worry constantly that dangerous criminals will be released unwisely.
“I don’t think the public at large has any idea of who’s in these prisons,” Sneddon said. “If they went and visited, they’d say ‘My God, don’t let any of these people out.’”
He noted that many states are seeking to send fewer offenders back to prison for technical violations of parole conditions. Some of these violations are indeed relatively minor, Sneddon said, but often they are accompanied by more serious criminal behavior that warrants a return to prison.
As budgetary pressures worsen, some advocacy groups are concerned that spending cuts will target the very programs needed to help inmates avoid re-offending after release—education, vocational and drug-treatment programs.
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The Council of State Government’s Justice Center has been working with 10 states to develop options for curbing prison populations without jeopardizing public safety. Tactics used in Texas and Kansas have included early release for inmates who complete specified programs, more sophisticated community supervision of offenders, and expanded treatment and diversion programs.
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In Florida, where prisons are so crowded that the state has acquired tents for possible use to house inmates, officials say 19 new prisons may be needed over the next five years. As an alternative, Corrections Secretary Walter McNeil told lawmakers they should re-evaluate the state’s hard-line sentencing policies and look at ways to help released inmates avoid returning to prison.
One important variable is the role of private prisons, which some advocacy groups consider less accountable that state-run prisons. Elizabeth Alexander of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project expressed concern that fiscally struggling states would rely increasingly on private operators.
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Original article
(Posted on January 12, 2009)
Comments
Clearly, what this means is that there is going to have to be alternate forms of punishment for certain types of people. For if prisons are becoming so crowded, then even threats of imprisonment aren’t going to work for even those on probation or parole.
All I can suggest is this: The Deep South, until the 1960s, had a pretty low crime rate and not much need for formal incarceration. Verily, they must have done something right, in contrast to today.
As the number of Blacks and Hispanics in America increases, so will the number of prisons needed to house them. As the percentage of Whites in America decreases, so will the amount of money available to house these offenders. We’ve reached the tipping point. Whites are no longer a large enough group to maintain the massive numbers of third world people. America is on a downward spiral.
Note that to save money, the government will return known and dangerous criminals to your community, but will NOT return illegals and their children back to their original countries. These illegals take our our jobs and cost us $ Billions in social cost. Removing illegal children from schools, alone, would save $ Billions. But, instead, they would rather put criminals back on the street.
The total costs for illegals and their families — education, housing, welfare, food stamps, Spanish-language ballots, policing and incarceration, outreach and affirmative action, crime and traffic accidents, sub-prime lending, etc., etc., etc. is staggering, and will bankrupt the USA. Remember also that in California, nearly 1/2 of all prisoners are Hispanic.
The government takes money from your family (taxes) and gives it to the families of illegals (education, etc.), and then says that they have so little money that they have to release dangerous criminals back into your community.
Our prison population, and crime in general, could be drastically lowered by legalizing drugs and ridding the country of illegal aliens. Our current drug policies are nothing but a price support system for gangsters and a jobs program for law enforcement. And they don’t prevent anyone who wants to use drugs from doing so.
Many (not all) of the inmates in for drug charges would probably be in for something else even if drugs were legal. There are two alternatives to incarceration that have been used for ages but have been forgotten in modern times. Both, I believe, are more humane than incarceration. One is labor and restitution. The second is banishment.
A convicted criminal could be forced to work and pay restitution to his victim, and a hefty fine, something to cover the cost of his arrest, and make the original crime not worth undertaking.
It looks like California is going to have the economic Armageddon that Schwartzenegger said was a very real possibility. And there are many other states not in such dire circumstances, but in big, big trouble all the same.
The overall economic picture looks really bleak, and it’s going to take a lot more cost cutting than releasing inmates to have enough money to continue to exist. Before all is said and done, states might decide that it is best to legalize some drugs, which will mean fewer people dealing and fewer incarcerations, reducing prison populations dramatically. It will reduce drug crimes as well by taking the profit out of selling and dealing.
Education is another high cost area. What surprises me is that so many of the states are resorting to cutting costs in every area but schools, which is the one area that has the most over spending, with their politically correct bi-lingual education, affirmative action, and other programs and courses that are nothing but foolishness.
Many economists who forecast the crash of 08 are saying that more jobs will be lost hereafter and people will have a harder time trying to feed their families, but, in spite of those things, local and federal governments will continue to raise taxes, especially property taxes, causing tax revolts and riots across the country.
I know in my area there has already been a kind of mini-revolt, with the people up in arms over an increase in the sales tax, but mostly huge increases in property evaluations, with property taxes rising as the value of their homes decreases.
As the economy continues to slide the chaos will cointinue to worsen, and I believe governmental jurisdictions are going to have to cut costs to the bone if they want to continue to survive themselves, because people will take so many hits on their pocketbooks and will pick up their pitchforks and march on the castle when it reaches what they deem to be an intolerable point. However, I seriously doubt governments will opt to downsize very much.
So who on the political scene is looking at the big picture and realizing that, if they’re a few billion short this year, they’re going to have even greater deficits with each passing year, and who is trying to come up with a plan to make up for the coming severe cash flow drop in order to stay solvent and free from collapse? The answer, of course, is that nobody is looking ahead and that’s the reason we’re in the fix we are right now.
2009 or 2010 could be Armageddon for the whole country and not just for California, if this sliding economy isn’t brought to a halt.
Everyone wants to imitate the UK, so this will fall out in steps:
1. Those felons already in prison will be offered fat checks if they will agree to leave prison and go to another state (or country) and not return to victimize OUR state’s citizens.
2. Potential felons will be paid fat checks if they will agree to not commit a felony, which would save on court time, police time, and emergency services. (Hey, it worked in Iraq!)
3. Police departments will get additional funding from the state if they FAIL to solve a crime or arrest anyone….unless they just have to. (If anyone actually gets arrested then resort to #4.)
4. Sentencing guidelines will be trimmed to eliminate the need for anything more than fines or home confinement for all but the most serious felonies.
5. Avoid conflicts with the prison guards (and their bargaining units) by allowing them to collect their pay, even if there are no prisoners to guard.
Now “everybody” should be happy.
Now, prison is one industry we might consider outsourcing. I suspect we’d get some good behavior out of bad boys if they had to spend the time in , say, China.
For decades, anti-immigrant organizations have been warning Californians that uncontrolled massive immigration of low-skilled, needy, high-birth rate Third Worlders would bring economic and social disaster. Liberal Californians called us racist and Nazis. Enjoy your multi-cultural paradise, California!
It’s a good thing people are buying more guns. They may need them, before it’s over.
I have a suggestion for a prison - the USA should build a prison in territory that it controls on the continent of Antarctica. No one in his right mind would try to escape from it.
It all goes to show that we shouldn’t judge too harshly previous civilisations in years gone by who as an alternative to imprisonment used pretty harsh coroporal and capital punishments.
“All I can suggest is this: The Deep South, until the 1960s, had a pretty low crime rate and not much need for formal incarceration. Verily, they must have done something right, in contrast to today.”
Do you have any evidence for this? Everything I have ever read stated that the South has had higher crime rates than the north right from the early settlements in the 17th Century.
One way to lower prison costs is to emulate the prisons in 3rd world countries where we could probably run 10 for the price of running 1 the way we do here. . But first we would have to change the laws to do away with all or many of the rights of the prisoners they now have. I spend 2-3 months a year in spanish speaking countries and thankfully have never been in one of their prisons but hear that basically they guard the perimeter and feed them enough to stay alive but leave the inside to the prisoners. Now this is not very good for the little guy who cant fight much but if he makes it out he may think twice before commiting a crime to go back. Why should we build comfortable hotel prisons and provide counselors and all these expensive programs. Of course this will never happen in the USA,, just let em go back on the streets to save money and make em promise to behave. KF
I work in corrections, and the administration loves to spend money on its population. Inmates have far more rights than the officers. And when an inmate becomes a ward of the state, they get excellent medical care, including transgender medicines. A lot of money is wasted in corrections. There are a lot of jobs made to accommodate political favors, very, very unnecessary jobs. I have no doubt my pay will be froze in the next contract, but administrative jobs that aren’t needed will remain. And yes, they will release prisoners, who will end up right back in the system, costing us taxpayers again.
Yet another absurdity that follows form Liberal doctrine “all people are equal”. In particular, criminals - according to Liberal preaching - are the same “equal” people as others who just made some mistakes and all they need is to “pay their debt to society” (as if raping or killing someone was some kind of a social loan) in order to become fully functional citizens just like everybody else.
As a result, the criminals rather than being gradually eliminated toot themselves for better and better in American society, passing their genes that make them prone to criminal acts on their children.
So, the population of people who are likely to break the law is growing to the point that our crippled economy can no longer afford this costly implementation of “we all need to get along” doctrine.
If the criminals were eliminated form the society, as they should, they would have very slim chances of passing their genes on to the next generation. Then we would not be faced with soaring costs of incarceration that is made even more costly by the “bleeding heart” Liberals who pushed for large increase of spending per inmate in order to make incarceration conditions more pleasurable.
And mass and mostly illegal “immigration” from countries notorious for crime, like Mexico and Salvador, makes all the above even more difficult.
The bottom line is that some four decades of implementation of Liberal nonsense crippled America and its economy. So, perhaps, now is the time to back out from it and return to truth and reason as opposed to Liberal failed ideology.
This prison problem is actually a whole series of interlocking problems. First of all, blacks are committing a disproportionate number of serious crimes. Secondly, the Feds have opened the borders, flooding the country with illegals, including a lot of drug pushers and other criminals, so the crime rate goes up even more. As the crime rate increases, the prison population increases, and our brain-dead politicians respond like they always respond to problems—with simple-minded and counter-productive “solutions” that only address the symptoms, make the problems worse and lead to more institutional corruption. Our glorious leaders like to pose as “tough on crime” by increasing prison sentences, leading to more overcrowding, and passing more laws, leading to more “crime” by definition. And the boom in the prison industry leads to more corruption and a steady degradation in the nature of society in general. The United States supposedly has the highest incarceration rate and largest prison population in the world. If not, it’s way up there. A lot of these prisoners, especially non-violent drug offenders, should be released on parole, but the politicians and prison bureaucracy always play games with these kinds of situations. Just watch. They’ll start releasing violent offenders in order to create public outrage and justify increased budgets. That’s the way the game is played. To really solve this problem, you need to close the borders, start deporting these illegal criminals, clamp down on the black crime problem, reform the idiotic drug laws and replace our present governing “elites” with people who actually care about the future of this country. None of that’s likely to happen, though. The economic collapse is going to put a lot of pressure on this corrupt system in the near future. With any luck, we might get to see it blow.
Cowardly politicians aided by an apathetic citizenry, are releasing criminals back to society because they would rather endanger the citizenry than stop illegal immigration and save billions of dollars. It is as if a mass group insanity has taken over Americans.
If you read the book VIGILANTE it shows how letting criminals out early or deferring punishment to “save money” is a self-defeating strategy. It is much cheaper to keep prisoners in jail because of all the costs to society they inflict upon it when they are free to roam.
America is broken beyond repair.
- My income is taxed heavily to pay for roads, yet I am still charged a usage fee (toll tax) for the privilege of driving to work each day.
- My income is taxed heavily to pay for schools, yet I am still charged a large property tax to subsidize an independent school district (…and we do not even have children).
- My income is tax heavily to pay for prisons, yet prison sentences are ignored and dangerous prisoners are released anyway.
I suspect the politicans in Washington and the state of Texas are simply taking my income tax money and property tax money and using it to subsidize their exotic personal lifestyles. meanwhile, the roads, schools, and prisons that my tax dollars are supposedly paying for are a mirage. Wake up!!! We are paying for the damned stuff twice!
There is consistently a political argument about whether an income tax, use tax, or flat tax is better. The truth is that the government is fleecing us with all three forms of taxes right now! Why would the criminal politicians ever choose to pare that back to merely one form of taxation?
Corrections Officer in Ohio has a vivid imagination. When I was locked up - three years for something I SAID (I did 36 months out of a 41 month sentence) - there wasn’t any of the mollycoddling he seems to think occurs in correctional institutions.
“Inmates have far more rights than the officers.”
Do you know an inmate who gets to go home to sleep in his own bed with his own wife at the end of each day? I don’t. One of my friends is doing 37 years for being stabbed in the neck. Yes, the guards have to be careful around some of the convicts. I still have a temper that could politely be described as “vile”, and my file says “firearms expert, explosives expert, chemist, ex-mercenary.”
When I did my time, I noticed that about 20% of the guards were thoroughly decent people who would help a fellow who behaved himself and didn’t make trouble. About 20% would go out of their way to make the inmates as miserable as possible. The middle 60% just regarded the whole thing as a job, and neither hated us nor helped us.
The guards I worked for in the Happy Fun Place were mostly good guys. Some of the black guards really hated us whites, but a fellow like me who worked hard didn’t attract much animosity, even though I did take naps behind the dishwasher midmornings. In the machine shop, the boss let only the Mexicans slack off. On grounds crew, our boss was totally crazy, and thought we should all be shot. He received psychiactric time off because he told his supervisor this.
One of the white supervisors was as mean as a three-day hangover with dry-heaves. He would close down the yard without notice, and then send the “violators” to the hole. Some of my friends and I were smoking cigarettes outside one summer evening in 2002, when he started screaming at us. We ignored him at first, because we didn’t think we were doing anything wrong; we didn’t know he had closed the yard. When he started toward us. we ran inside. He later asked for and received a transfer to a max.
