Excellent piece of reporting by Maureen Hayden, writing for CNHI. She has an article entitled “prison officials say lighter sentences aren’t saving money.” Sentencing reform has reduced DOC sentences by 17%. However, the Department of Corrections says this isn’t saving any money. That 17% represents offenders who would have been incarcerated in a DOC facility under the old sentencing law but, under the new law, are serving time either in a county jail or through a county community corrections program. One premise of the new sentencing was that it was less costly to have offenders serve time in local facilities or programs and that the cost savings at DOC could be used to compensate the locals for the extra burdens. But, pursuant to a required report, the DOC says no extra money can be cut from its budget despite having 5,000 fewer inmates.
DOC says that costs are up $400,000 through six months. The state pays $35 per day to house a low level offender in a county jail compared to, the DOC says, $10 per day in a state facility. Senator Steele who chaired the Senate’s judiciary committee thinks these numbers are bogus. “Two years ago, when Correction Department officials asked lawmakers for money, they reported it cost about $60 a day to house a state prisoner.” Reading Hayden’s report, there seems to be a suspicion that DOC is getting creative with its numbers because it doesn’t want to give up money.
Corrections officials don’t see it that way. The department’s legislative director, Jon Ferguson, said the $10-a-day rate used in the report is a “marginal per diem” that doesn’t include the fixed, operational costs associated with running big prisons. And the number of those prison facilities the state operates hasn’t gone down since the sentencing reform law was put into place.
This is troublesome because — while part of the rationale for reform was that keeping offenders close to home was better for communities and reform prospects — a big part of the rationale was that keeping offenders out of state facilities would result in cost savings.
With the schools, they insist on hours of testing and then use the scores to decide which school and who fails, and then punish the ones who don’t measure up. Very “outcome-based”. When the state looks at prisons, they don’t seem to care about those “outcomes”, i.e., whether their facilities produce people who will make some contribution to society and not recycle into the jail. I haven’t read the report, but I wonder if there is anything said about measuring “effectiveness” of the staff or what happens to the guests who “graduate” from those facilities. Isn’t rehabilitation supposed to be one of the purposes of jails, or is it just punishment? Do they punish staff who don’t change the prisoners? How much do we have to punish people so they begin to learn different behavior? Or is it all just about money?
Stuart, Section 18 of the Indiana Bill of Rights states:
Section 18. The penal code shall be founded on the principles of reformation, and not of vindictive justice.
This provision has been pretty much ignored.
At the local level this was viewed as another unfunded mandate. Counties saw this as a cost shift to save the state money, but certainly not them. They weren’t under any illusion they’d ever see any funding.
Sigh.