PRISON PAY-GO

By sending prisoners out of state, letting some out of jail early and moving others to underused facilities, the Department of Corrections will temporarily lessen prison-overcrowding problems. A longer-term solution is to require lawmakers to consider the consequences of mandating jail terms for some offenses and requiring longer terms for others.

A pay-as-you-go, or pay-go, budget requires reducing programs or raising revenues in other areas to offset new programs or tax cuts. As we suggested for new state spending last week, a prison pay-go would require that bills calling for longer or mandatory sentences require disclosure of the costs of such requirements. For example, would new jail space need to be built? Would inmates in prison have to been sent elsewhere to make room for the new convicts? Such disclosure would make it clear to legislators and the public that being “tough on crime,” whether it be drunken driving or sexual molestation, comes at a cost.

Earlier this week, Corrections Commissioner Martin Magnusson told the Legislature’s Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee that the state’s prison system was at an “emergency level.” The state’s adult facilities are over capacity by about 300 inmates.

The crowding is taking a major toll on staff, he told lawmakers. Some staff are working so much overtime that they are sleeping in their cars after their shifts because they’re too tired to drive home. The overcrowding also means that some inmates are not getting the treatment services they need.

Commissioner Magnusson proposed to ease the overcrowding by sending about 125 prisoners to facilities in other states, by releasing some female inmates to transitional housing and by moving some adults to the juvenile detention facility in Charleston. These moves would cost about $1.3 million for the next two months and nearly $8 million in the next year.

Mandatory sentencing enacted by the Legislature is the biggest reason for the overcrowding, Commissioner Magnusson said. A recent report by the Corrections Alternatives Advisory Committee notes that the large increase in the number of inmates is the result of more people being sentenced to jail and staying longer, not because of an increase in crime. In the past 20 years, the average daily population at state prisons had risen 71 percent.

In the last legislative session, lawmakers passed laws to toughen the sentences for habitual drunken drivers and for sex offenders whose victims were under the age of 12. They also passed several laws that expanded the definitions of crimes that could require jail sentences. Each means that more people will be crammed into the state’s prisons.

Tougher or mandatory-minimum sentences may be needed, but lawmakers should be required to know and account for their fiscal consequences, by either finding the money needed to cover the added costs or by designating other classes of prisoners for early release to make room for new ones.