Mike Klein
Georgia Public Policy Foundation
Each day across Georgia, the state Department of Corrections feeds a population that is nearly equal to a community with 60,000 residents. Paying for the state’s corrections system with its 31 state prisons costs taxpayers $1 billion per year, including the cost to manage 150,000 parolees.
This month the PEW Center on the States reported the first year-to-year drop in state prison population since 1972. The percentage rate began to decline in 2007, but real numbers did not decline until last year. Unfortunately, not in Georgia which posted the sixth largest percentage increase in the nation, a 1.6% growth rate, and in real numbers, the Georgia prison population grew by 843 adult felons.
Just four states incarcerate more state prisoners than Georgia. As public funds dwindle, can Georgia continue to spend 6% of its budget on corrections? Is there a more cost-effective but equally secure balance between incarceration, reduced sentences, treatment programs, parole and probation? Does the term “corrections” imply incarceration, or does it actually suggest another possible path?
Georgia might begin the search for solutions by looking west to Texas.
Five years ago Jerry Madden became chairman of the Texas House corrections committee. Texas faced an escalating prison population and escalating costs. Madden had no criminal justice experience. But he brought to this new task the analytical focus of a retired career engineer and the discipline of a West Point graduate. His view then was, “I thought we should lock them up, throw away the key.” Madden was also smart enough to know what he did not know. He started asking questions outside the box.
Madden brought together conservative and liberal public policy foundations, including justice systems analyst Marc Levin at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He asked them to analyze the prison system, find common policy ground where it existed and bring forward innovative ideas that would get Texas off the spiral of more incarceration leading to more prisons. “If you build it they will come,” Madden says. “Someone will send them there.”
Fast forward two years to January 2007. A year earlier the Legislative Budget Board predicted Texas would need 17,000 new prison beds within five years. Construction costs were estimated at $2 billion. Republican Governor Rick Perry was prepared to announce the state would build three new prisons costing $560 million. Jerry Madden saw an opening: “He gave me the perfect storm.”
Madden took recommendations from his study groups to Perry. He proposed a new model that would rely on additional beds for substance abuse treatment, the creation and expansion of specialty courts, additional probation funding to reduce caseloads, additional funding for mental health care and halfway houses, the creation of short-term jails for adults serving less than two years, a small increase in the annual parole percentage rate and programs that would reduce the number of incarcerated juveniles.
Madden told the governor that the new model could be accomplished for about $240 million. His goal: Create something that would cost less than new prisons and produce better results. “There is nobody who thinks Texas is soft on crime,” Madden says. Perry canceled his new prisons announcement.
Three years later Texas is showing results. Now the same Legislative Board says Texas will not need new adult prison beds until at least 2014. Texas reduced its adult prison population by 1,257 persons last year. Texas remains the nation’s second largest system with 154,000 inmates, behind only California. It has some 440,000 adults on probation, including 170,000 on felony probation.
“Corrections” was redefined to correct behavior, nor just incarcerate people. Madden created four principles to drive the mission: Public safety, restitution, appropriate penalties for behavior and perhaps most important, rehabilitation. “Because that’s what corrections should be about,” Madden told a Georgia State University seminar this month in Atlanta. “That’s one of the missions. What good does it do to send somebody to prison for a time and when they come out, nothing has changed?”
Texas is by no means alone in creative corrections system thinking. But it is among few southern states achieving success. Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Florida all reported increased prison populations last year. The best result produced by a Southern state other than Texas was Mississippi which reduced its incarcerated adult population by 1,233 persons. That was the sixth best performance nationally.
Georgia operates the nation’s fifth largest prison system in the nation’s ninth largest state. Prisoners cost taxpayers $46 per day. Reducing the Georgia prison population just 10% to even 54,000 inmates would have a $100 million positive impact on the annual state budget. No major corrections system reforms were passed during the current General Assembly.
State prison populations rose dramatically as a result of get-tough legislation that featured mandatory sentencing, longer time served before parole eligibility, judges who used their discretion to impose long terms on non-violent offenders and politicians who won votes by vowing to get tough on crime. High profile crimes brought to the public attention by national media created strong anti-crime sentiment.
While encouraging, the 2009 year-to-year decline in state prison populations would need to continue for some years before a definite trend could be acknowledged. Crime and criminals behind bars are still a national problem. The number of state prisoners in 1972 was fewer than 175,000; today they number 1.4 million. This does not include prisoners in the federal system, or those in city and county jails.
This problem is too big to ignore and Georgia would do well to look beyond its borders for innovation.
Mike Klein is Editor at the Georgia Public Policy Foundation. Prior to joining GPPF in March 2010 he was a public broadcasting executive and previously, Vice President of CNN in Atlanta.
