The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

It is a perplexing enigma of our times: Why is it that crime rates have been dropping for years, and, yet, our prison system continues to grow and grow? The obvious answer is that tough laws that crack down on offenders and take them off the streets for many years are responsible for decreasing crime rates. There is truth in that. People prone to committing crimes have considerably less opportunity if they're behind bars.

But that presupposes that new generations will produce as many or more criminals as in the past, making it necessary to accommodate an ever-expanding prison population. Clearly, more needs to be done to keep people from becoming criminals -- and candidates for Florida's prison system
-- early.

Corrections has become a $2 billion-a-year enterprise in Florida. And the fact that the state Department of Corrections wants to increase its bed capacity to 91,165 this year, at an additional cost of $125 million, is a terrible indictment of Florida's failure to combat crime by investing in better early child care and youth services, education, family intervention, drug treatment, counseling and job training.

The DOC is asking the Legislature to increase bed capacity at prisons in Columbia, Marion, Taylor, Wakulla and Union counties this year. And it wants to build a brand-new prison in Suwannee County, one that will eventually cost $82.9 million and house more than 2,000 prisoners.

The Suwannee facility, when completed, will provide 305 jobs and a payroll of nearly $14 million a year to that rural county. And perhaps that's yet another reason for the unchecked growth of Florida's correctional empire -- it has become as much an economic-development tool as a crime suppressant. It is not for nothing that U.S. 90, as it winds its way through rural North Florida, is called the "Avenue of Incarceration."

A prison system that is within spitting distance of reaching 100,000 beds is a gigantic monument to Florida's failures. Recidivism rates in Florida's prisons are approaching 50 percent. Because the emphasis is on incarceration, rehabilitation is given short shrift. Of the nearly $50 a day spent housing an inmate, only about $1 is spent on education.

Warehousing human beings is not a long-term solution to fighting crime. Strategies and programs that address the root causes of crime are ultimately more costefficient and more humane public policies. Instead of continually expanding the prison system, state lawmakers should be exploring ways to shrink it.

Investing billions of dollars a year to warehouse human beings while skimping on rehabilitation and programs that can truly address the root causes of crime is short-sighted public policy. More and more, Florida prisons are becoming large-scale AIDS wards, holding pens for the mentally ill and enforced retirement homes for elderly inmates who can never be released because of inflexible "three strikes" sentencing laws. It does our society no credit that America's incarceration rates outpace those of nearly every other industrialized nation in the world. And the need for jobs in rural counties notwithstanding, prisons are not the answer to economic development.

If the Suwannee prison is built, just four of Florida's 67 counties will lack state correctional facilities. Is that really a winning strategy to fight crime?

http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050212/NEWS/502120327/
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