The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

SCI-Pittsburgh's unexpected reopening, after closing in 2005, is a response to an emergency.

"If you say, 'Am I surprised?' Yeah, we are," Secretary of Corrections Jeffrey Beard said. "We wouldn't have closed it if we knew we were going to have to open it in two years."
Faced with an inmate population that is already 5,000 over capacity and growing at 200 a month, Beard said the state has little choice but to reopen the prison. That will bring the state prison total to 27.

That's only the beginning. Beard has asked the Legislature to fund construction of three new prisons and expand several existing facilities. The cost: $658 million, plus $80 million in annual operating costs added to the department's $1.6 billion budget.

Yet Beard insists building prisons is the wrong way to fight crime. "I'm convinced that this is not the best way to do it. From a public safety perspective, what we're doing is not the best thing," he said.So Beard, who got his start in the department 35 years ago as a psychological administrator, is trying to persuade lawmakers to adopt reforms he claims would better deal with crime and reduce inmate population in the bargain.

He points to New York, which trimmed its prison population 11 percent between 2000 and 2005, faster than any other state in the country.

Beard would like Pennsylvania to emulate the Empire State, which grants inmates early release for completing job-training programs and has put 23,000 drug offenders through a special court system that sentences them to treatment, not hard time.

The secretary has allies. One is House Speaker Dennis O'Brien, R-Philadelphia, who is readying a bill with early-release provisions. It also would set state guidelines to expedite parole once inmates have served their minimum sentences.

"It's not something that's going to happen overnight, but I think if we start doing things in a more thoughtful way, if we try to be smart on crime rather than just locking people up ... we might not have to keep building prisons," Beard said.

Pennsylvania's inmate population rose 15 percent between 2000 and 2005, third-fastest behind Florida and North Carolina among the 10 states with the biggest prison populations, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Prison populations in neighboring New York, New Jersey and Maryland declined over that period, and held steady in Delaware and Ohio. West Virginia's increased.

The state is not locking up more violent criminals.

In 2000, the state's prisons held 20,352 convicts guilty of what the FBI calls "Part I" crimes, including murder, rape, assault, robbery and burglary. In 2006, they held 20,349 -- actually three fewer "Part I" inmates. The more than 7,600 inmates prisons added over that time were mostly people convicted of nonviolent "Part II" offenses -- including drug crimes.The rest are parole violators, and most of them are not sent back to prison for committing a new crime, but for so-called technical violations, such as failing a drug test or skipping a meeting with a parole officer.Of the 5,434 parolees recommitted to prison in fiscal 2006, 70 percent were sent back for technical violations, according to the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole.

From 1940 to 1980, the state's inmate population hovered around 7,000.

So flat were incarceration rates, and for so long, Carnegie Mellon University professor Alfred Blumstein published a paper in 1973 positing a "theory of the stability of punishment."
Blumstein hypothesized that inmate populations were stable because societies have a limit to how many people they are willing to see locked up. The criminal justice system, he said, maintained equilibrium by paroling convicts when prisons got too full.
While Blumstein was formulating his theory, the public got other ideas. Increasingly concerned about rising crime rates and lax judges, voters started demanding tougher sentences.

Legislatures delivered. The Pennsylvania Sentencing Commission was formed in 1978, part of a movement across the country to standardize and toughen punishments.

Combined with President Nixon's call to combat illegal narcotics -- the beginning of the war on drugs -- it was enough to upend Blumstein's equilibrium theory.

Prison populations in Pennsylvania and nationwide started creeping up. They never stopped.

Pennsylvania's inmate population, now more than 45,000, has grown every year since 1976.

"What I've come to appreciate later is the fact that you have people who you don't mind punishing," Blumstein said.

Instead of being reserved for violent criminals, prisons increasingly are holding pens for drug dealers and addicts.

Murderers accounted for 21 percent of state prison inmates in 1980, according to statistics from the Department of Corrections. Less than half a percent -- 311 out of 8,243 inmates -- were behind bars for drug crimes then.Now more than 9,200 are in for drug crimes, making them the biggest group at 20 percent of the inmate population. Murderers are second at 16 percent.

New York once had the nation's strictest drug laws. People caught selling 2 ounces of heroin or cocaine faced sentences of 15 years to life -- the same sentence they would have gotten for murder. But softening those laws and refocusing on treatment programs lowered the number of drug convicts behind bars from 23,000 a decade ago to 14,000 now.

Martin Horn, secretary of parole and corrections for New York City and Beard's predecessor in Pennsylvania, said people should consider whether tax money is best spent on locking up nonviolent criminals.

"A tax dollar can only be spent once, and you can either spend it on prisons, or you can spend it on roads and bridges," Horn said.