The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Corrections Director Patricia Caruso said the policy options presented today are "a critical step toward an affordable and effective corrections system that helps us go beyond what we have achieved in cost savings since 2003." Council findings included:

• Violent crime arrests dropped 22 percent between 2000 and 2007, while such crime dropped only 2 percent.

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• 50 percent of people on probation and 50-70 percent of those on parole lack jobs.

• People released from prison have served, on average, 127 percent of their original minimum sentences.

The recommendations come from the council's Justice Center, which is involved in a 2- to 3-year study to help Michigan trim its $2-billion corrections budget.

The recommendations are a first step toward trimming Michigan's $2 billion prison budget.

Michigan runs the nation's sixth-largest prison system at a cost of $5.48 million a day or about $200 a year for each resident. The state also is one of just four that spends more on prisons than on state universities -- $1.19 on prisons for each $1 spent on schools.

There's a growing sense that the prison system, at its current size, no longer is sustainable, given the state's longstanding fiscal problems.

The state's corrections budget is under closer than usual scrutiny as lawmakers and Gov. Jennifer Granholm look for ways to resolve a projected $1.6 billion revenue shortfall in the state budget year that starts Oct. 1.

The Legislature has resisted making any major changes in sentencing and parole policies, expressing worries the result would be more crimes by inmates set free before they were rehabilitated. But the study by the prestigious council could provide justification for significant overhauls in the prison system.

In a two-day special series last April, The Detroit News reported:

• The prison population has grown four-fold in the last quarter-century and now numbers nearly 50,000.

• The $31,325 it costs to house a Michigan inmate for a year could pay three years worth of tuition for a student at a state university.

• Michigan incarcerates inmates at a higher rate than any other Midwest state and estimates are that the state could save $500 million annually if it locked-up criminals at a rate more like its neighboring states.

• Mushrooming prison spending has not stopped the state from ranking 10th among the states in the rate of violent crimes -- the only Midwestern state in the top 10.

• Today's prison population equals the combined populations of Ferndale, Mount Clemens and Harper Woods.

• Because of Michigan's stringent parole practices, about 12,000 inmates who've served their minimum sentences remain locked up.
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090122/METRO/901220434/1
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