Gazette Opinion: Education vs. Incarceration

Story available at http://billingsgazette.net/articles/2009/05/11/opinion/gazette/20-gazetteopinion.txt

Gazette Opinion: To cut long-term prison costs, take care of kids

By The Gazette Staff - May 11, 2009
"The adult offender population is the driving force in all the Department of Corrections does." So begins a section of the DOC's biennial report recently delivered to the 2009 Legislature. And that quote explains why Gazette readers last week saw headlines that said:

"Consultant proposes big prison for Billings" and "State panel backs 920 new prison beds for Montana."

The DOC manages about 2,600 offenders in prisons and an additional 10,400 in drug treatment, pre-release centers and on probation or parole. Those offender numbers are tracked daily as the department continually works to predict what they will be next month, next year and beyond. Gov. Brian Schweitzer directed the department to take a long-range look at demand for offender supervision and incarceration. The 2007 Legislature appropriated $250,000 for a study.

It was conducted over the past year by a national consultant who recently delivered a 176-page report that, among many other things, assumed an average prison population growth rate of 3.9 percent annually and recommended building a prison in Billings with 1,800 cells to handle a projected growth in the offender population over the next 16 years.

As Eve Franklin, a former state legislator and now Schweitzer's corrections policy adviser. pointed out, a consultant's report isn't public policy. "There are no prison beds in the biennial budget," Franklin told The Gazette.

But a majority of the members of the governor's Corrections Advisory Council, a panel that Franklin recently joined, did vote last week in Billings to recommend four future prison projects:

• Up to 116 beds for housing Level 1 and 2 sex offenders, which constitute the offenders judged to be at lower risk of reoffending than the Level 3 offenders.

• A 152-bed facility to treat inmates who are seriously ill, including those with mental illnesses.

• Adding 512 minimum- or medium-security cells for men - if the projections of 3.9 percent annual growth in the offender population continue through 2015.

• Building an additional women's prison in Billings with 250 beds.

Lt. Gov. John Bohlinger, who chairs the Corrections Advisory Council, said his highest priority among the four recommendations is a facility for Level 1 and 2 sex offenders. Schweitzer's biennial budget proposal delivered in October included adding that capacity, but as revenue projections plummeted, the governor pared the sex offender space from his proposed budget. Bohlinger said the $350 million lawmakers put in House Bill 2 for DOC is $32 million less than the governor's original October budget request.

Moving toward treatment
The long-term prison-need projections are all the more shocking because we've heard that Montana's prison population was actually declining slightly while the U.S. prison population continues to grow. In fact, the number of men and women imprisoned in Montana dropped in the fiscal year ended last June 30. The male population declined 4 percent while the female population dropped 21 percent. Moving inmates into new addiction treatment programs helped reduce the incarceration numbers, according to Bob Anez, DOC spokesman in Helena. The state has seen a two-year decline in the rate at which offenders return to correctional institutions.

The total number of all offenders in custody or supervision grew from 10,354 in 2004 to 12,860 in 2008, according DOC. Fewer of them were locked up because prison is being used less for nonviolent and nonsexual offenders than it was five years ago. The department set a goal of managing 80 percent of offenders outside prisons and is "on target" with that goal, Anez said.

Is Montana going to add prison cells?

Not in the next two years, and maybe not as many as the consultant recommended by 2025.

Invest in education
"I'd rather invest money in our education system," Bohlinger said when The Gazette phoned to talk about the corrections study. "If we put our arms around 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds, if we have preschools and expanded kindergarten and these children learn appropriate behavior at an early age, if we invest in education, the expanded need for human services and prisons will diminish."

Bohlinger is far from alone in that view. Research by Federal Reserve economists has demonstrated that quality early childhood services increase the probability that children will graduate from high school, stay out of prison and stay off welfare. If we want to avoid building the megaprison the consultant sketched out, we'd better put sufficient resources into graduating youths from high school and college with the skills to compete in the job market.

Building a 1,800-bed prison in Billings?

Outrageous!

Ignoring the long-term consequences of child neglect, poverty and school dropouts?

Even more outrageous!

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Students, what are your thoughts???????? If you held the purse-strings for the state of Montana, would you invest in education or prisons and why?