The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Corrections Commissioner Richard Allen recognizes that he is addressing a continuing funding problem with a one-time solution, but he said he has no other realistic option to meet his budget for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.

"We don't know where the money will come from after next year," he admits.

The state prison system has thousands of acres of land scattered around Alabama, and Allen said there is no foreseeable use for much of it. The agency is conducting a study to determine what land it can sell and what revenue it can expect from that sale, and will make recommendations to Gov. Bob Riley this week.

Allen said he hopes the agency can realize enough revenue from the sale of land to fund such continuing operations as the department's housing of prisoners out-of-state and its drug rehabilitation programs.

Allen said the department plans to maintain necessary buffer areas around existing facilities where possible.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any state agency looking at its property holdings to determine whether there is excess land for which there is no realistic foreseeable use, and selling what is not needed now or expected to be needed in the future. But it is unsound fiscal management to use the one-time revenues from such land sales for operating expenses that will continue in subsequent years.

Allen makes a persuasive argument that he has no choice, even though all the agency will be doing is delaying its budget crisis for a year.

But delaying the Corrections Department's fiscal crisis for a year won't accomplish much if the Legislature doesn't use that time to come up with long-range funding options for the agency.

The state's prison system funding problems are well known. The system houses roughly twice the number of inmates that its facilities were designed to hold, creating dangerous situations in some prisons. The system also has a high number of prisoners per corrections officer, which only adds to the problems. It's per-prisoner costs are always among the lowest in the nation.

The Corrections Department is funded out of the state General Fund budget. Despite a booming economy which has spurred record high revenues in the state's education budget, revenues in the General Fund have failed to keep up with the growth in costs for those programs which it funds, including Medicaid and state troopers.

The state attempted to address chronic overcrowding problems in a variety of ways in recent years: It is paying to house inmates out of state, it reduced a backlog in the paroles processby creating a second parole board, and it changed sentencing laws to allow more alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent criminals. Those changes did reduce the number of inmates somewhat, and new sentencing guidelines could further help to slow the growth of the inmate population.

But despite those changes, the number of inmates has again reached an all-time high, according to a department spokesman. In April the department had 28,775 inmates, about 300 more than the previous all-time high in April 2003.

If Alabama policymakers are going to continue to have a tough-on-crime stance that locks up lots of people for long sentences, then they need to find the funding to pay for the necessary prison system to house them. Otherwise the system eventually will implode. After all, the Corrections Department only has so much land it can sell.

http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070529/OPINION01/705290307/1006