The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

“We didn't just wake up this morning and find ourselves here,” said Adam Gelb, project director for Pew's Public Safety Performance project. “This is a milestone that the nation has been approaching for a long time. Getting tough on criminals has gotten tough on taxpayers.”

The nationwide prison count has tripled since 1987, and the cost of imprisonment — about $86 per inmate per day in Connecticut, according to the state Department of Correction — has the potential to crowd out other pressing needs, said Susan Urahn, managing director for Pew Center on the States.

“States will need to make choices,” Urahn said. “Not necessarily between corrections and higher education, but between corrections and something.”

The Pew study found that public-safety initiatives like three-strikes laws, harsher sentencing laws and mandatory prison time for those who violate parole and probation, in addition to an aging prison population, have contributed to more Americans being incarcerated than at any other time in history.

“It's obviously troubling that our state is spending more locking people up than it is providing them with education,” said state Rep. Andrew M. Fleischmann, D-West Hartford, co-chairman of the legislature's Education Committee.

Fleischmann believes that if more people had access to higher education, fewer of them would be in prison.

In Georgia — a state that spends 50 cents on its prisons for every $1 spent on higher education — a scholarship program called HOPE (Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally) provides free tuition and money for books to students with at least a 3.0 grade point average who are seeking a college degree from a Department of Technical and Adult Education or University System of Georgia institutions.

Fleischmann says that while Connecticut has an excellent university and community college system, the state needs to step up to make that education accessible.

The other three states spending more on prison than higher education are Vermont, Michigan and Oregon.

Nationwide, according to Pew, young black men are entering prison at an alarming rate. Approximately one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 is incarcerated, compared to one in 106 white men.

“I would be concerned if there were someone who was not disturbed by those numbers,” said Fleischmann.

Brian Garnett, spokesman for the state Department of Correction, pointed out that while Connecticut's prison-to-higher-education spending ratio was cited in the study, overall Connecticut was average in terms of its prison population growth and the percentage of state money spent on its prisons.

Garnett said since Commissioner Theresa Lantz took the helm in 2003, she has made re-entry programming a priority for Connecticut's prisons, doubling the number of halfway-house beds.

“Because they work,” Garnett said, pointing to a 24 percent recidivism rate for offenders who re-enter society through halfway houses, as opposed to a 47 percent rate for those who simply re-enter straight out of prison.

In Texas, the state decided that it would rather put the money needed to build eight new prisons into community programming for released inmates, according to the Pew study, and its prison population has now stabilized.

Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell has said she has a similar outlook on prisons.

“Community release programs that are conducted under strict guidelines and conditions enhance public safety because offenders who re-enter society under parole supervision are far less likely to reoffend than those who are released without the benefit of a supervised release,” Rell said in a press release last month.

Fleischmann said the legislature is moving in the right direction toward spending more money on education and less on prisons.
http://www.theday.com/re_print.aspx?re=24da50f5-b377-4c4b-bafe-34f89da09542