Beyond the findings of last week’s prison system budget symposium, two audits raise new and serious questions about prison system management and spending.
MICHIGAN PRISONER RE-ENTRY INITIATIVE CONTRACTING PRACTICES
The Michigan Department of Corrections and advocates of sentencing reforms have lauded the department’s “MPRI” program for helping prevent parolees from returning to prison and thereby keeping both the prison population and costs down. Indeed, department statistics suggest about one-third of parolees who receive MPRI’s job training and other counseling programs to help them adjust to life in the community are back in prison. Overall, about one-half of those who get out of prison end up there again.
But an audit report completed in February and obtained by the Center for Michigan under the Michigan Freedom of Information Act raises serious concerns about the MPRI program, which costs $44 million per year.
In short, the audit concludes that MPRI contracting procedures are “not effective,” and have resulted in mismanagement. And, the Department of Corrections “has not established the capacity to collect and report data related to services provided to offenders by MPRI contractors and subcontractors. As a result, (the Department) is limited in its ability to monitor and report statistics related to delivered services and to evaluate cost-effectiveness of each service component.”
The audit found double-billing and overpayment of contractors and auditors’ inquiries ultimately resulted in canceled contracts and hundreds of thousands of dollars in returned payments to the state. In one case, a full-time salaried executive director of a nonprofit agency also was funded as a $100,000-per-year MPRI “community coordinator,” and received another $30,000 under federal grants.
In another case, auditors reported: “DOC was fully funding a contractor’s day reporting program but only a portion of the participants were DOC offenders. DOC or its fiscal agent had referred only 18 of the 26 female offenders listed on attendance sheets. Of the 18 offenders, only 12 attended sessions during the period. We noted similar under-utilization and non-participation for another risk reduction contract. After we brought this to DOC’s attention, DOC canceled the two contracts for which DOC had budgeted $550,000 for fiscal year 2010.”
Department officials said they have corrected many of the problems discovered in the audit. But numerous legislators with oversight of the Corrections budget have seen this audit and it is shaking their confidence in the overall MPRI program. “Except in some specific regions of the state, I do not see a lot of evidence that MPRI is working,” one powerful senator remarked to The Center for Michigan last week.
PRISONER DRUG COSTS ARE OUT OF CONTROL
Michigan taxpayers spend $40 million per year on pharmaceuticals for inmates in state prisons. A just-released audit of the prison pharmacy system revealed 67 separate problems in drug security, inventory control, inefficient delivery of medicines, inefficient business practices, and other mismanagement.
The cost of pharmaceuticals in Michigan prisons are a whopping one-third higher than the average costs of nine other states served by the same pharmacy contractor, auditors found.
For a six-month period in 2010, the average number of different medications prescribed per prisoner was eight and the average pharmaceutical cost per prisoner was $730.
Thirty-five percent of the prison systems pharmaceutical costs are for anti-psychotic medications. Moving to generic forms of those medications and other cost saving measures could save between $1 million and $8 million per year.
Reducing overall drug costs to the average of the other peer states would save $10 million per year.
Among the egregious problems listed in the report, auditors found that prison nurses and guards were not performing the basic function of assuring that prisoners actually took their medications, “thereby increasing the risk that prisoners could prolong health issues, stockpile the medications for a possible suicide attempt, or introduce them as contraband in the facility.” Work rules require nurses and/or prison guards to watch as prisoners swallow medication, require the inmates to talk after swallowing, and perform mouth checks if necessary. “We observed distribution of medications at 9 facilities,” auditors wrote. “None of the 9 facilities required the prisoners to speak after placing the medication in their mouth to help assure the nurses that it was actually swallowed.” Mouth checks were not standards at all prisons. Worse yet, investigators made similar findings in previous audits.
3 Comments
Similar misMANAGEMENT (rarely if at all front line workers, who do carry out work rules while the auditors audit nonexistent standards that daily the tax-supported glut, layers upon layers of management ignores and fails to implement) just as discoverable in Department of Human Services and Department of Information Technology (that the previous Governor recently tucked away into now Department of Information, Management and Budget, like nothing going wrong behind that door…). But yes, Corrections is a great start, next Human Services and DIMB, then the same misMANAGEMENT of tax dollars in Education and Transportation. To cut the budget once and for all, cut/streamline this (mis)management gone rampant we see for far too long to the tune of Michigan $billions.
Be careful about substituting non-generic drugs. While the audit identifies certain poor practices, it is important that mentally ill prisoners receive the correct psychotropic medicine.
As a retired MDOC nurse having worked in the system as a nurse and manager for 13 years I can tell you that even when we followed all the procedures to watch prisoners take medication, they are slick, conniving, deceitful and play the system to get ALL the meds they want. If they don’t, they sue. That’s expensive too. Those that have never passed a med, watched the prisoner “swallow” it, talk to the nurse, drink a glass of water, smile at the nurse and walk away and bring the pill back up and out of his mouth and pass it to another prisoner have no idea how difficult it is to know if they actually took the med or not! Leave it to a bunch of surveyors who have never worked the job to know just how it should be done. I could go on forever.