Throwing Away the Key

When your overall budget can only increase by 6% per year, the key to balancing it is keeping every item in it at 6% or less. But when it comes to criminals, we have a habit of locking them up and tossing away the key -- to their cells and our budget.

For next year we're spending 9% more on prisons, parole and the rest of the corrections budget. It’s a big increase, but it's not a surprise. We've been spending about 10% more on corrections each year for the last decade.

Why? More prisoners. Every year we lock up an additional thousand or so people; next year we're expecting 1,100 new inmates. To put it in perspective, 1,100 prisoners would fill up about two medium-sized penitentiaries.

How did we get into this mess? The roots of the problem go back to 1985 when the legislature doubled the sentences for felonies. Lock people up for longer and prisoners tend to accumulate. Costs started climbing as soon as the new sentences started taking effect.

In the early 90s the legislature responded by putting a fiscal restraint on new crimes: no new crimes or sentences unless the law also found funding for the first five years of locking up the new criminals. Then the voters put a fiscal restraint on the entire budget by passing TABOR and the chances of paying for new prison space plummeted.

Still, the 1985 changes imposed long sentences and left judges little discretion in meting them out. Over time those long sentences have compounded and today we have about 20T people behind bars and another 6T or so on parole. Put another way, back in 1986 corrections cost $57M; next year it will cost $646M. Our incarceration rate has been about twice the national average over the last decade and there's no sign of a letup anytime soon.

Can we afford to build and staff enough prisons? It's a tricky question. Sure we could find the money, but it would come from higher education, transportation and other services people want. What else can we do? One obvious answer is to stop locking up so many people. But that means changing the sentencing laws and the governor has promised to veto any bill that shortens any sentences.

Another option is to make sure that when prisoners get out of prison they stay out. Today about half the prisoners we release wind up back in prison before too long. In some states that number is down around 38% or 39%. Can we match that? Maybe. One of the fastest growing groups in prison is people who are mentally ill. Fifteen years ago about 3% of the people in prison had a serious mental illness. Today it's 30%.

Treatment might help. Next year we're investing about $2M in a new mental health treatment center for juveniles who have been sentenced. It will also offer them treatment for drug and alcohol abuse. It's not much, but it's a start.

Education helps too. A study of prisoners released in Maryland, Minnesota and Ohio found that those who got an education while they were locked up were less like to get re-arrested, re-convicted or re-incarcerated. They earned more money than other ex-cons too. Maybe there's a connection. Unfortunately, next year's budget is spent. After five years of cuts, the new money from Ref. C went quickly, just trying to restore some of the services we eliminated. We can’t afford to add educational programs to prison now, but it’s part of our plan for reducing recidivism and cutting the cost of corrections.