Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s plan to cut the prison population through awarding “good time” credits, opening halfway houses and hiring parole officers is raising concerns among law-and-order activists of a possible crime wave.
Experts say her plan to release 7,500 prisoners and close five facilities follows a nationwide trend that supporters say shows community support services do more to reduce crime than long jail sentences.
The proposals, part of Granholm’s budget for fiscal year 2011, have had a first hearing before the Senate Judiciary and Corrections Committee. Still, fears over prisoner releases prompted Senate Majority Floor Leader Alan Cropsey, R-DeWitt, to offer an alternative that would result in fewer released convicts and smaller savings. Granholm is trying to wipe out a $1.7 billion budget deficit.
The debate over releasing prisoners comes as the first of 1,300 Pennsylvania criminals arrived at the shuttered Muskegon Correctional Facility late last month. Pennsylvania is about 7,000 prisoners over capacity in its own corrections system and plans to house them at Muskegon.
Michigan has about 40 correctional facilities and has been looking for alternative uses for its closed or soon-to-close sites. Pennsylvania will pay Michigan $62 per prisoner per day to use the Muskegon prison — a few dollars less per day than Michigan pays to house in-state prisoners there, Corrections spokesman Russ Marlan said. Michigan will make a small profit, about $500,000, by charging Pennsylvania a 1 percent administration fee, Marlan said.
Under Granholm’s plan to shave $139 million from the Corrections budget next year, “good time” credits for prisoners would be restored. They were eliminated for some violent crimes by ballot Proposal B of 1978, a ban later expanded to all felonies. Granholm also would undo the 1998 Truth in Sentencing law that requires felons to serve at least their minimum sentences.
She would resurrect community residential programs, also known as halfway houses for prisoners, which were banned under the Truth in Sentencing law, which requires all sentences to be served behind bars.
Some of the estimated savings of $139 million would be reinvested in more parole officers and increased support for parolees, such as substance abuse programs, job training and housing assistance.
Critics: Gov shifting burden
Opponents argue Granholm is shifting the corrections burden to local law enforcement agencies.
“You can’t balance the budget on the backs of public safety,” said former state Court of Appeals Judge Bill Schuette, a Republican candidate for state attorney general. “You’re shutting down prisons and putting dangerous criminals out on the street, and at the same time local communities have fewer cops enforcing the law.”
Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard, who is running for the Republican nomination for governor, said crime will skyrocket if the prisoners are let out before they’ve been rehabilitated.
Michigan has the fewest local law enforcement personnel per capita among Great Lakes states despite having the region’s highest crime rate, according to a study by the Council of State Governments Justice Center.
Cropsey has offered an alternative plan that would, among other things, hold the line on Truth in Sentencing, ensuring that people in prison continue to serve no less than 100 percent of their minimum sentence. But prisoners, with the exception of lifers, would never serve more than 120 percent of their minimum sentence, effectively reducing the maximum sentence for many prisoners.
The Cropsey plan also limits jail time for first-time parole offenders to nine months. And offenders would have to be released at least nine months before reaching their maximum sentence to be sure they spend at least that long on supervised parole in the community.
Cropsey’s plan would reduce the prison population by 433 the first year, for a savings of $2.2 million. By 2014, 4,669 prisoners would be released, and savings would total $35.3 million.
Cropsey said Michigan prisons should be used to house the state’s own prisoners — not emptied and then refilled with criminals from other states.
“If our governor’s insisting we let more of our prisoners out on the streets, we might as well make some money on what’s left,” he said. “But I think it’s wrong to let out as many as we have.”
As evidence of how Granholm’s plan would work, Marlan points to the Michigan Prisoner ReEntry Initiative, which uses community-based programs and services, and resulted in a 32 percent reduction in recidivism among parolees, with 2,083 fewer returns to prison in fiscal year 2009. A study by the Pew Center on the States found that for every dollar Michigan spent on prisons in 2008, it spent 10 cents on probation and parole.
“We don’t send as many people to prison as the national average, but our issue is how long they stay,” said Marlan. “Our average of 51 months is almost twice the national average.
“(We need to) take some of that money for housing prisoners and invest it in communities to get at that population that commits crime.”
Other states have ‘good time’
States increasingly have reduced maximum sentences, rolled back truth-in-sentencing laws and adopted “good time” for prisoners to contain skyrocketing corrections budgets and embrace research-based strategies to keep criminals from reoffending.
“States are looking at the budget as well as a growing body of data on what works and what doesn’t work in (community) supervision,” said Alison Lawrence, a corrections policy analyst with the National Conference of State Legislatures. “The majority of people eventually get out of prison, so there’s a new focus on whether incarceration works as much as we’re doing it.”
Kentucky, Minnesota, New York, Rhode Island, Texas and Washington are among more than a dozen states that tweaked their sentencing structure in 2009 — from raising the bar on what constitutes a felony, to narrowing the definition of a habitual offender or removing mandatory minimum sentences for some crimes.
At the same time, states are investing more in programs — from mental health services, to substance abuse treatment and job training — that research has shown to reduce recidivism, according to Lawrence.
“Because prison is expensive, you can take some of that money and better allocate it to better supervise more inmates in their communities,” Lawrence said.
In Michigan, where the state’s $2 billion Department of Corrections budget consumes 22 percent of the general fund compared with a national average of 6.9 percent, Granholm has focused on shedding prisoners who have served at least their minimum sentences — reducing the prison population by 6,300 since 2006. Ten Michigan prisons or prison camps were shuttered in the past year.
From The Detroit News:
