Treatment and support services for ... inmates re-entering society cost $12.6 million two years ago. That was when mental health care, job training and community residential programs for people on parole helped make Kansas a national model for success.
Now the model has been dismantled. For the fiscal year beginning July, the corrections department will get about $5.3 million to fund those programs under Gov. Mark Parkinson’s budget recommendations.
To the taxpayer and government officials desperately trying to balance the state’s books, the short-term savings are hard to resist.
But experts know that a convict ill-prepared for “re-entry” — especially in this job market — may mean only rising crime in the coming years.
Should [an offender] violate his parole and be taken off the street, it will cost about $25,000 each year to incarcerate him.
“Just like that — the national model we created no longer exists,” said state Rep. Pat Colloton, a Leawood Republican who leads the House Committee on Corrections and Juvenile Justice. “We were written up in The Wall Street Journal. I was invited to the White House,” when then-President George W. Bush signed legislation directing $54 million in federal grants to help duplicate Kansas’ success around the country.“The fact that our programs had gotten it right — and we had the data to prove it — didn’t keep us from destroying that model,” she said.
Meanwhile, in response to their budget crunch, Georgia isn't considering reducing inmate numbers, but a prominent native son, Newt Gingrich, has been pushing for them to do so:
For many, many reasons, I'm thankful Texas has biennial instead of annual legislative sessions: One of the big ones is that our budgeting decisions aren't quite as reactive and knee-jerk as they might be if a new budget were crafted every year. Texas has time right now to identify ways to our correction costs safely instead of hacking away willy nilly at successful diversion programs.Newt Gingrich, the former Georgia Republican congressman who served as Speaker of the House from 1995 to 1999, wrote recently in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that “Georgia simply can’t afford for the corrections system to maintain the status quo.”
Gingrich argued that recidivism rates are unacceptably high and that churches and non-profits need to offer more resources and support to help offenders who are released from prison build productive lives in the community.
“Celebrating taking criminals off the street with little thought to their imminent return to society is foolhardy,” Gingrich wrote in the article, which was co-authored by Mark Earley, a former attorney general of Virginia.
Supervising an offender on parole costs Georgia taxpayers an average of $4.43 a day, compared with $46 a day to house someone in prison.
Senate Finance Chairman Steve Ogden recently told the Houston Chronicle he doesn't favor exempting TDCJ from budget cuts, which means the state faces the same stark choice as Kansas in its corrections policy: Slash diversion programming (which is what TDCJ proposed), or increase funding for diversion, reducing the incarceration rate and slashing (much greater) prison spending. Just about one year from now the rubber will meet the road on those decisions. I hope we don't screw it up, like in Kansas.
See related Grits posts
- Tarheel prison units closed with budget cuts, Michigan may expand good time
- TDCJ needs 'Plan B' to rescue successful community corrections investments
- Which prison units should Texas close? Private contracts, security concerns may factor in
- The shortest distance to cutting 5% at TDCJ: Reduce drug penalties
- An 'unrepentant, hard-right conservative' was 'forced to agree' with prison diversion 'based on the facts'
- Correa: Preserve diversion funding, cut prisons to reduce TDCJ's budget
- Texas' criminal justice challenge in 2010: Find solutions to coming budget crunch
- Might 2011 budget crunch bring TX prison closures?
- As 2011 budget crisis looms, should most expensive prison units be closed?
- Data on TDCJ unit age and cost
- As 2011 budget crisis looms, should most expensive prison units be closed?
- States slashing spending costs, closing units
- Some states actually shutting down prison units
- Emptying prisons makes Wired magazine's 'Smart List'
- California's partisan prison meltdown: Why Texas didn't go there
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10 comments:
"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else."
Winston Churchill
You'd think that after 'doing the right thing' in Kansas that it would have become self-evident as to what worked and what doesn't, but it's always the short-sighted pols who only look to the next election and don't look 5-10-15-20 years down the road, to see where their decisions lead.
Anybody with reasonable intelligence could (and did) note that the orgy of prison building precipitated by the DrugWar these past 20 years was dependent upon an ever-expanding economy not subject to the usual boom-and-bust cycle.
Well, here we are in the midst of the biggest bust since the Great Depression...and we just cannot afford to staff, much less fill, those prisons. And so the time's come to do some real budget cutting. Which is politically dicey, as nobody with political aspirations wants to be slapped with the 'soft on crime' brush.
But like as not, the budgetary axes are quietly being ground in the legislatures, for economics doesn't care about posturing or appearances. It's cut back now...or cut back later when things get really bad.
Thomas Frank still has it right: What's the matter with Kansas?
You know Michael, I thought about using that phrase in the post, but it's more complex than that: Kansas has been doing some really commendable, impressive evidence-based work. My understanding is that they were hamstrung by mandatory minimum statutes in a way that's not applicable here and their options were extremely limited.
It's frustrating, though, because on this they were doing it right. But at crunch time, fear of being called soft on crime trumped budget writers' better angels. Additional policy changes were needed to cut corrections as deeply as was needed, and they just weren't ready or willing to do it. They're exactly where Texas will be a year from now - they can either double down on the diversion strategy or fold their hand, and they basically wimped out.
kaptinemo: I don't disagree with a single word you wrote, including (perhaps especially) the Winston Churchill quote.
We hold communities responsible for reducing recidivism. This may be hard for some to believe but part of recidivism is the responsibility of those who choose to continue in the behavior that led to their being convicted in the first place.
A firmly entrenched belief system also contributes to recidivism. Criminals are often prone to habitually distort their thinking and this leads to a pattern of behavior that renders them dangerous to their community. There are many examples of criminal thinking patterns but I will list just one.
"Unique person” stance. This criminal thinking pattern allows you to think no one in the whole world is like you or has experienced what you have. Rules don’t apply to you. You commit crimes because you never think you’ll get caught. You believe that if you think it, then
it must be that way.
"Kansas is headed down exactly down the path I fear Texas may go if state officials don't seriously consider closing unneeded prison units in the coming legislative session:"
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Problem 1) Texas officials don't see ANY prison unit as "unneeded".
Problem 2) Texas politicians have built a mammoth prison system (112 prisons at last count) based on telling the idiots who vote for them that crime is really bad and they are TOUGH on crime. They are not likely to reverse this.
Problem 3) Do you honestly believe the dumb-asses who spawned this huge, monstrous prison system have the gonads to shut ANY of them down? Do you?
Scott, isn't your response similar to Frank's book? Common sense solutions to problems are trumped by what is politically popular or expedient. This is true in Kansas and in Texas. So glad my home state of Arkansas isn't like that. :)
I suppose, Michael, but it's not all in one direction was my point. A lot of folks in Kansas have been ahead of the curve and this was, for them, a big blow. The stereotype may hold in the big picture, but there have been some forward thinking people doing some good stuff there - a quite a few of them in the GOP.
Boyness, your comments on every single post on this subject have just one theme: "It can't be done." I disagree, mostly because I've been told that before on reform projects (like getting rid of Texas' statewide network of drug task forces) and then sometimes succeeded. Sometimes not. There's never been a horse that can't be rode, never been a cowboy can't be throwed.
I think it's possible to shut down anywhere from 2-6 units next session, depending on whether the Lege can enact policy reforms to justify it. Is it a sure thing? No. Will it happen if nobody advocates for it? Definitely not.
Can't never could.
Scott, I say it cant and you say it can. The reality will likely be somewhere in between but my point in driving this CANT theme home is that no one is seriously talking about this. Governor Wig certainly does not seem excited about it (as far as I know, he has said nothing).
Whose going to ride this? Rodney Ellis? John Whitmire?
The budget process will drive it, Boyness. Unlike the feds, the state can't borrow. They actually have to make choices, and in politics they only make choices among a limited array of options put before them by staff and/or advocates. If this is on the table, when the hard decisions are made there's a good chance they act on it.
People are already thinking along these lines. The House Corrections chair has said it's "on the table." Whitmire said it's possible but asked for an exemption (that I think he won't get) instead. Steve Ogden says he opposes such exemptions and all agencies should be cut. Out in the advocacy world, folks like Tony Fabelo, Marc Levin and Ana Correa have been advocating a similar path. Plus, the terms of debate have changed since 2003 because many in the Lege will want to protect the programs they built the last two sessions. If it happens, it won't be something one person pushes: It will be a decision forced upon them by crisis.
Look at it this way: If I'd told you in 2001 after the Tulia scandal, back when Texas had about 50 drug task force employing some 700 narcotics officers statewide, that they all could be successfully brought down during a period when Rick Perry was Governor and the Lege would shift to 100% GOP control, you'd have similarly said it was crazy. But that's when the plan was hatched, and five years later Rick Perry shut down the last of them. Some of it was luck, some timely opportunism, but as with much in life, 90% was just showing up and trying to make it happen. The same is true IMO on this issue.
Like I said, can't never could.
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