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March 13, 2007
MI: A Way to Fill-Up Prisons Just As Some Prisoners Are Being Released
Free Press
Detroit, MI
Taking the long way to square one
March 7, 2007
BY BRIAN DICKERSON
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST
Taxpayers who argue that Michigan could get by just fine with a part-time Legislature clearly don't appreciate how complex the task of making laws has become in our fiscally challenged state.
For instance, the current legislative session is scarcely three months old, but our elected representatives in Lansing are already hard at work figuring out how to 1) reduce the number of nonviolent offenders incarcerated in our state prisons and 2) increase the number of nonviolent offenders incarcerated in our state prisons -- not necessarily in that order.
To understand the contradictory imperatives at play here, let's examine each prong of the problem the way seasoned legislators do, in complete isolation from the other prong.
The search for savings
Lansing's desire to reduce Michigan's burgeoning prison population arises from the state's need to cut spending by about $900 million before April 30 or start dunning taxpayers for the difference.
Earlier this year, a bipartisan advisory panel appointed by Gov. Jennifer Granholm suggested that the state, which currently imprisons a much larger percentage of its population than most of its Midwestern neighbors, could save truckloads of tax dollars if it stopped feeding and housing its least-dangerous inmates.
Granholm quickly followed up by proposing a $92-million cut in the Department of Corrections budget -- a savings she said could be achieved in part by freeing low-risk and sick inmates a little earlier than their scheduled release dates.
But fear not, Department of Corrections employees! What the budget-cutters taketh away, lawmakers may soon restoreth with a new law that could plunk thousands of drunk drivers into our already bulging prisons.
A new source of inmates
A law Granholm signed this year (after it won lopsided passage in both
houses) authorizes prosecutors to charge drivers facing their third drunken-driving convictions with a felony punishable by up to 5 years in prison -- even if their previous arrests occurred decades ago.
The Senate Fiscal Agency says it has no idea how much the new law will cost taxpayers, because it has no way of predicting whether more drivers will be
1) dissuaded from committing a third DUI offense or 2) incarcerated for committing one.
But insurance data indicate that about 80% of two-time DUI offenders become multiple offenders. Birmingham lawyer Pat Barone, who specializes in the defense of DUI defendants, predicts the new law will generate between 6,000 and 10,000 new felony cases a year.
If 75% of those new felons are sentenced to the minimum prison term authorized by the new law, Michigan taxpayers would pay another $139 million to $232 million a year -- or about twice what Granholm proposes to save by releasing currently incarcerated low-risk offenders early.
If all goes well, Michigan's overcrowded prisons will be right back where they started by the time the new fiscal year begins.
Ha! I'd like to see a bunch of part-time legislators do that.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070307/COL04/703070326/108
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Posted by lois at March 13, 2007 09:44 AM