We’re going to go way out on a limb here and say THANK YOU to the Michigan Department of Corrections and the Granholm Administration for finding the intestinal fortitude to announce last Friday the closure of three prisons and several prison camps throughout the state.
The prison guard union is furious at the prospect of losing hundreds of jobs. Rural communities like Standish and several in the Upper Peninsula are furious at the loss of jobs (so are the state legislators representing those areas).
And a few grand-standing politicians are stopping just short of predicting the end of civilization as we know it because the closures require the release of 3,500 prisoners who just so happen to already be past their dates of eligible parole.
There are two blunt questions for those who would oppose change and reform in a prison system which has grown exponentially in the past 30 years to the point where it overshadows every other public priority in the state general fund budget:
1. If you are unwilling to accept prison closures, what other public priorities — community colleges and universities? Local governments? State police? State parks? Hunting, fishing and natural resource protection? — would you take from in order to continue to fund the status quo in prisons?
2. If you wouldn’t take from those other priorities, which taxes would you raise to fund the status quo in prisons?
Faced with an ongoing state budget deficit of more than a billion dollars, Michigan must come to grips with reality and make hard choices about its public purse priorities. Even after this month’s painful prison closures and the unfortunate job losses, more must be done.
Payroll costs account for three-fourths of Michigan prison spending.
Those prison payroll costs have increased in the past several years even as staffing levels have decreased.
The average Corrections Department salary in Michigan is 20 percent higher than the average of other Great Lakes states, according to the Citizens Research Council.
In reality, there is still much more the Corrections Department can do to streamline operations, including handling medically infirm prisoners in more cost-effective out-of-prison care centers, turn over hundreds of potential deportees (and their costs) to the federal government, privatize some operations like food service and reform arcane and costly prison guard work rules.
The political resistance to change this week was bipartisan. But so were some forward-looking, problem-solving messages from legislators.
Republican Law-and-order Senator Alan Cropsey was among the most strident in his opposition to further prison closures. But he also rightly pressured the governor to focus “on having prisons run more efficiently.”
Democratic Senator Liz Brater echoed a coalition of business, nonprofit, education and local government groups — including the Center for Michigan — which have pushed for hundreds fo millions of dollars in prison budget cuts: “We’ve been spending far too large a proportion of our general fund on corrections.”
Republican Representative John Proos urged additional bipartisanship “to find additional efficiencies that would put us in line with per-prisoner costs in other states.”
Finally, Democratic Representative Alma Wheeler-Smith didn’t blink in discussing the “outliers that are going to cause headlines” — a statistically insignificant number of parolees who will no doubt commit new and horrible crimes and who will bring media scorn and threaten to erode political will to further reform the prison system.
