Report: Indiana corrections spending out of balanc

[wthr 13 news]

Report: Indiana corrections spending out of balance

Indianapolis - A new report says Indiana has three adults on parole or probation for every one in prison or jail, but the state spends only two cents on them for every $1 spent on incarceration.

The report from the nonprofit Pew Center on the States says that at the end of 2007, one out of every 26 adults in Indiana was part of a correctional population of people in jail or prison or on parole or probation. They numbered more than 181,000.

But the report says fewer than one in four of those people actually were in prison or jail. With one in 35 adults on parole or probation at the end of 2007, Indiana's per capita rate was the eighth highest among the 50 states.

[MCFr]

We can spend on prison space - and on trying not to fill it

We can spend on prison space - and on trying not to fill it
More room for worst prisoners, more help for the rest of them.

Gov. Mitch Daniels wants to spend money to add about 600 beds each at Miami Correctional Facility and Wabash Valley Correctional Facility, the only two construction projects he's seeking from a reluctant General Assembly in this tough budget year.

But the Pew Center on the States reports that Indiana has three adults on parole for every one in prison or jail and invests only two cents on them for every $1 it spends on incarceration. It says the state should invest more in areas such as community corrections and parole programs to help keep ex-cons from returning to prison.

Who's right? There is probably some truth on each side.

We lock up a lot of people here. The Pew report says one in every 26 Hoosier adults was in jail or prison in 2007, compared with 1 in 31 nationwide.

It makes sense for all kinds of reasons - fiscal responsibility, community safety, humanitarian concern - to spend as much as we can afford on keeping the recidivism rate down. It might gall some people to spend so much time and attention on people who have violated society's rules, but every parolee who can be turned into a productive citizen is one less ex-con the community has to worry about.

Such programs can take us only so far, however. The shortage of prison bed space in Indiana - the problem the governor seeks to fix - is for maximum-security prisoners, the kind of convicts least likely to benefit from those wonderful alternative approaches. Maximum-security inmates have gone from 22 percent of the Department of Corrections population to 29 percent in four years, while the DOC's baseline budget has remained flat.

Our 1-in-32 incarceration ratio compares with a 1-in-106 ratio in 1982. Did the state really become that much more criminal in just 27 years? In a way, since an efficient way of increasing crime is to change the definition of crime. The Indiana General Assembly, joining the get-tough-on-crime trend, enacted much tougher measures, such as mandatory sentencing and harsher drug laws, that have swelled prison ranks. Now it balks at paying the bill.

Maybe it's time to study our whole penal approach - whom we lock up, what it costs, what we expect and what we really get. Maybe the General Assembly should take some responsibility for seeing such a study gets done.