Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | The American Prospect

No resources, no results: Kentucky had good intentions in releasing some nonviolent offenders to save money. But the state shortchanged its post-release programs, and an opportunity was lost.

Article Excerpt
In the early 1970s, America's prison population began a dramatic expansion that has continued, uninterrupted, ever since. By the year 2000, one in every 14 general-fund dollars spent by the states was being spent on incarceration. Vast high-security prisons were constructed at a cost of a quarter of a billion dollars each. Today, prison spending is, on average, the third largest state expenditure (after education and Medicaid); more than $40 billion a year is spent on maintaining and running the more than 1,400 prisons nationwide.

During the budget crises of the last couple of years, state political figures have begun realizing just how devastating the prison boom has been. They are also realizing that it is almost impossible to solve their budget crises without reducing the dollars heading into corrections. "The 'get tough' policies of the 1980s come with a high fiscal cost," says Marc Mauer of the Washington-based Sentencing Project think tank. "And policy makers are increasingly aware of this. If they need to balance state budgets, corrections represents a good source of budget cuts."

Paradoxically, with the fiscal crises come opportunities: to find more cost-effective ways to reduce crime than the "lock 'em up at all costs" strategy of the recent past; to rethink drug-sentencing policies that have placed hundreds of thousands of nonviolent addicts behind bars; to rethink stiff mandatory and habitual-offender laws that have swelled the numbers of inmates serving inordinately long sentences; to reorder spending priorities so that more people are diverted away from prison and, for those who are still imprisoned, to direct more money toward services preparing them for release. If this can be done, two goals will be achieved at once: Crime-fighting dollars will be spent in a more cost-effective way and the prison system will be shrunk without an unwelcome spike in crime or a politically irresistible public reaction against reform.

Unfortunately, not everyone is taking the long-term view. Over the past couple of years, as their budgets diminished, many states instead decided to cut costs the quick and easy way: through the early release of prisoners. Oklahoma, Montana, Arkansas and Kentucky have each released hundreds of inmates. In December 2002, Kentucky granted early release to...