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August 22, 2005
Letter to Editor: Re--"Expensive" MA Jails from Lois Ahrens
August 22, 2005
Editor
Springfield Republican
Springfield, MA
To the Editor:
According to the June 2004 Governor’s Commission on Corrections Reform Report, the average cost of incarcerating someone in Massachusetts is $43,000. And, as you reported the 2004 for the budget for the MA Department of Corrections is $428 million. 73% of the DOC budget goes to salaries. While Steven Kenneway, of the MA Correction Officers Federated Union blames the high cost of prisons on overtime, he fails to mention that without overtime salaries of MA CO’s in 2003, excluding benefits and overtime range from $59,919 to $71,946. Perhaps the number of overtime hours could be reduced if CO’s didn’t receive 52 paid days off per year. Is MA getting its money’s worth? In western MA alone, more than $81 million dollars a year is spent on jailing people who are incarcerated because they can’t make bail and mostly for non-violent drug-related convictions. The $81 million is the cost before the yearly expenses of supporting the proposed controversial jail for women in Chicopee.
Of the close to half a billion dollars the state spends every year to imprison people, only 3% goes to programs ($14.2 million). Since 2001 that is a 43% decrease in programs. 4,000 or 47% of people incarcerated in 2002 did not have a high school diploma or a GED. In that same year, the DOC was able to allocate enough money to enroll only 321 in GED programs. 65% of women who are incarcerated have an open mental health case yet the money for mental health and addiction services decreases yearly. People with little or no formal education and no job training are released from prison in worse shape than when they entered.
The reality is that interest groups such as the Correction Officer Federated Union and others so many others who directly benefit from tax payers largess continue to push for costly punishment over cost-effective rehabilitation. These powerful interests will keep at it, until those of us who pay their salaries and the bills say “NO!”
Lois Ahrens, Director
Real Cost of Prisons Project
Northampton, MA
Posted by lois at August 22, 2005 09:40 PM