Legislators return to Lansing next Monday after a two-week break. Among the many budget challenges awaiting them, reform of the state prison system continues to top the list.
Here’s where things stand…
The 2009-10 Corrections budget passed the House of Representatives on April 3, with the governor’s recommendations largely intact. You may remember the original headlines a couple months ago about more than $100 million in prison cuts. Turns out that’s a GROSS number. The NET general fund budget reduction for Corrections as passed by the House, is a cut of $47 million (2.6 percent). Highlights:
RESISTANCE TO PRISON CLOSURES MAY BREW IN THE SENATE
One key question now is whether the Senate will block prison closures. Particularly keen opposition may come from law-and-order Republicans as well as Democrats with prison facilities in their districts.
If the Senate – in conjunction with the House – does not approve additional prison closures, it is unclear how even modest reform savings would materialize. Without Corrections savings, the budget pressure only increases on a wide range of other strategic priorities for Michigan’s future.
The view of one prison system insider who asked to remain nameless given the sensitive nature of the negotiations…. “It’s ridiculous the amount of money we could save if we could get people off of lock-solid philosophical positions.” Those “hundreds of millions” of savings are possible through sentencing reform, housing medically fragile in Medicaid-funded facilities outside the prison system, and prison closures.
CORRECTIONS EXECUTIVES NOT WAITING FOR LEGISLATIVE ACTION
Prison bosses are moving forward with various belt-tightening measures absent further action in the capitol. On the governor’s direction, the state parole board expanded this week, with goals of speeding paroles and keeping prison populations in check (the system is already down several thousand prisoners from projections). But a number of additional management tools await legislative action.
2 Comments
John -
It’s important to keep focusing on Michigan’s disproportionate prison population. Over the past 20 years, our legislators, prosecutors, and judges have decided – through their repsective actions – to spend $2 billion per year on prisons, rather than to have lower taxes, more funding for education, more cops on the streets, or any other priority. Corrections has been cannibalizing the State budget.
It is also important to understand clearly the progress that has been made over the past five years. As the Michigan Prisoner ReEntry Initiative has succeeded in changing policy, practice, and culture in the Department of Corrections, the return-to-prison rate for parolees has declined more than 25%. It’s still too early to prove that MPRI is responsible for this improvement, but progress in occurring in the direction predicted by national research.
Almost all prisoners eventually go home, but MPRI has begun to prepare them better to succeed when they to. With supervision and services in the prisons and communities driven sharply by what has been proven to improve results, Michigan is starting to see real benefits in terms of a lower prison population without increasing risk to the public.
These changes, along with a declining rate of prison commitments, has yielded a reduction of about 3,500 inmates compared to the peak of 51,000. This is a real reduction, not just down from projection, as stated in your article.
The recommendations from the Justice Center of the Council of State Governments present a critical next step. The work of the Center was carried out on a collaborative, bipartisan basis, and now the leaders of the legislative and executive branches can make a great contribution to the people of Michigan by following the prescriptions laid out in those recommendations.
As this process of reforming and refocusing Michigan’s prison system toward improving the public protection returns on our tax dollars, we need very careful monitoring and evaluation to make sure the process continues to have the intended results. If so, it should merit strong support from all. If not, we should learn from what’s been done and try to do better. What we can’t do is return to the old way of doing business, which cost too much and failed to protect the public.
– Jeff Padden
It has long been known that Michigan was turned from an automotive state to a prison state by former governor John Engler. The truth about the prison system has been a worse coverup than “Watergate” the truth constantly being held from the public to bolster politicians and their enormous line of bull!