Grace Ross: Time to Crack Down on Prison Costs

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Grace Ross GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Grace Ross, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

In 2006 when I ran for Governor I did an across the board analysis of our state budget. While healthcare continues to increase in cost and eat up more and more of our state budget, the budget for Corrections, that is prison and criminal supervision in addition to prison costs, ate up 1 out of every $20 in our state budget. It seemed to me that to be responsible to the people of this state I needed to assess whether that money was being well spent. Safety being a critical function of government if that money was being well used, it might have been worth the investment.

However, only a few years earlier, a Blue Ribbon Commission of the state government – bipartisan with some of the strongest voices both as democrats and republicans – had come out with a scathing report of monetary waste in our corrections system overall. Now, of course, our economy has collapsed and wasteful state spending, one would think, would be under even more scrutiny. Here, we have not the occasional little incident that some individual makes, but a system-wide expense in the many millions of dollars; one would think a state government that was both responsible to the tax-payers and cared about balancing its budget would pay some attention to this.

The report was clear. We were wasting money and more recent reports from the Pew Charitable Trusts (“1 in 31”) has shown that Massachusetts lagged far behind the best practices in other states; we lag both in terms of decreasing crimes and of decreasing costs to our overstretched state budget.

Widely distributed, the Harshbarger Commission’s reports showed that we waste money in the purported name of creating safety; so often expressed with inflammatory language, this flagrant misconception that we throw away the key on everyone who goes to prison is untrue and clearly impossible. Were we to give life sentences for even petty theft our prison budget would perhaps eat our entire state budget. We all know that the vast majority of crimes are minor and as such should be punished proportionally; otherwise, we create a situation where if you are going to steal a cigarette you might as well do what the banks have been doing – steal entire homes and fortunes and life savings – if the punishment is the same.

The study also pointed out that since folks do overwhelmingly return to the community, the deep cuts in programs to rehabilitate and incrementally prepare people and move them back into the community after long prison sentences back fire. We have been spending much more money than the cheaper expenditures of transitioning people back into the community; instead, we have been keeping them, for instance, in higher security prisons and having more folks returning to prison after being released.

Fuelling the increasing lack of transitional programs was the fact that most folks were not eligible for transitional programs. The proliferation of mandatory minimums, again, supposedly because it protected the community even though all the evidence shows the opposite, had created the reality that almost no one was eligible for transitional programs before they served out their sentence; mandatory minimum sentences meant that they were serving longer sentences and serving them all the way until they had the right to be released; they had no transition time while in corrections.

With all the overcrowding created by the above bad choices, people who committed similar crimes a decade earlier were now being graded as much more dangerous inside the prison system. These higher gradings cost us more as prisoners were moved into higher and higher security ratings and serving at security levels with much more long term and hardened criminals. Again, making their return to community less effective and more dangerous for the general public.

All of these negative spirals have continued.

The true outrage? Now having made the worst policy decisions on our correctional system expenditures possible for over a decade by ignoring the majority of best practice evidence from states around the country, state legislation is being considered most aspects of which would worsen our situation. Instead of avoiding policies that have failed elsewhere, our legislature is actually considering a “three strikes and you’re out” bill. Instead of decreasing crime through proven and cheaper methods, some elected “leaders” are taking advantage of whatever inflammatory rhetoric available. That’s easy in a period when people are overwhelmingly feeling unsafe because of the economy. The “three strikes and you’re out” legislation was made famous in California and that state has mostly scrapped it because it was wildly ineffective and only made things more expensive and more dangerous for the average citizen. Even that bill had exemptions in it that might have saved it which the Massachusetts version does not even have.

The majority of this bill needs to be scrapped in the name of proven safety and budget savings – only the changes to mandatory minimums in this bill move in the right direction.

I get it about wanting to score points when all you care about is being reelected. I just keep hoping that what we really want are public servants who are about serving us, the public, as taxpayers and as residents who in a scary time period need more intelligent elected leadership, not those who want to secure a fast election and leave the rest of us in trouble with the decisions they make once they are elected.