AUGUSTA — In its 1995 effort to boost productivity, the King administration cut more than 100 positions from the state Department of Corrections.

Now the governor wants them back.

While reviewing the department’s proposed two-year $190 million current services budget Wednesday, corrections Commissioner Joseph Lehman told members of the Legislature’s Appropriations and Criminal Justice committees that 102.5 new positions will be sought in an additional spending proposal that is expected to slightly exceed $9 million. If Lehman gets all that he’s asking, the two-year budget will be about $200 million.

“Returning 102 employees is an awful lot of people to bring back over a two-year period of time,” said Rep. George Kerr, D-Old Orchard Beach, House chairman of the Appropriations Committee.

Lehman maintains that changes to the “good time” law that the last Legislature approved have resulted in prisoners serving more and more of their court-imposed sentences rather than being released early for behaving themselves.

Emphasizing that the state’s adult inmate population was actually declining in the early 1990s, Lehman also admitted that administration officials did not correctly perceive the effect changes in the “good time” law would have on department staffing.

“It was a new law and we had a lot of discussion about what the impacts were going to be,” Lehman said. “Our best guess was that the impacts were going to be long-term and would not be felt early on. We guessed wrong. So now the only thing that’s driving up the inmate population is the change in the length of stay of the offenders.”

Lehman said he wanted to add 45 staffers to the new Northern Maine Detention Center in Charleston, while spreading out more guards and staff through other parts of the corrections system. His proposal includes new positions for a mental health stabilization unit to be incorporated within the Maine State Prison.

There are also new staffing problems arising at the Supermax facility at Warren.

“During the past year there has been a significant increase in the amount of misbehavior on the part of inmates including assaults on staff,” Lehman said. “What is happening is that there has been a hardening of the inmate population. We’ve had an influx of gangs, like the Latin Kings from Massachusetts, who have been acting out. We are asking for six additional staff to more closely control the movements of some of these inmates.”

Sen. Michael Michaud, D-East Millinocket, spent dozens of brain-numbing hours reviewing department budgets for the Legislature as part of Gov. Angus S. King’s Productivity Realization Task Force in 1995. He was skeptical of the kind of cuts the Corrections Department wanted to make then, knowing that changes in the “good time” law were coming.

“My feeling back then was that they were cutting too deep considering the changes in the law, but the department maintained they could live with it,” he said. “Now it looks like they can’t.”

Michaud returned to the Legislature this year as Senate chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and warned Wednesday that he wanted to be certain that the department really needs the positions before he approves any additional staffing requests.

“It’s hard to say how it will turn out,” he said. “We’ll have to wait until we start working with them during the work sessions, but I’ll be looking at it very closely.”

Lehman was optimistic over his ability to plead his case before the Legislature.

The corrections chief wouldn’t take any bets Wednesday on the outcome of his request, but added, “I think that we’ve done the work that we need to do to demonstrate to this committee and others the need for these programs.”