POLITICS
A new study attempts to raise
awareness on prison overcrowding
by Charles N. Wheeler III
Soft on crime? Even the most inept political consultant knows that's a tag no candidate wants.
Smart on crime? Even the savviest consultants aren't sure that's a winner.
The Taxpayers' Federation of Illinois, however, is trying to promote that label in hopes of slowing down the rapid growth in state prison spending. To encourage public awareness of what's at stake, the federation last month issued "The Price Tag for Prisons," a study authored by this writer that looked at the budget impact of a quarter century of get-tough-on-crime policies.
"We wanted to try to quantify the costs of the popular law-and-order initiatives and remind the state's citizens and taxpayers that get-tough policies don't come cheap," says Timothy Bramlet, president of the nonprofit, nonpartisan budget watchdog group.
Indeed, the study reported that locking up an adult offender for a year costs taxpayers an average of $18,500; the tab jumps to $36,000 for youthful offenders. And in the last quarter century, the study found, the number of inmates has soared more than four-fold, to almost 45,000 adults and 2,100 juveniles.
Largely as a result of the prison population explosion, the operating budget for the Illinois Department of Corrections has grown more than 15-fold in the last quarter century, to a current $1.3 billion. That's three times the growth rate of the rest of state government.
Moreover, the state has spent some $1 billion since 1977 to open 19 adult prisons, with four more on the way. Even so, penitentiaries today are more crowded than when the building boom started, with almost 45,000 adult inmates now crammed into facilities designed for 28,000. The state's eight juvenile facilities -- two more are being built -- also are crowded, with some 600 more youthful offenders than their design capacity.
The mushrooming prison population stems from several factors, the study found. Changes in sentencing laws, from Class X in 1977 to truth-in-sentencing in 1995, have resulted in more offenders confined for longer periods. Thanks to the war on drugs launched in the 1980s, with its harsher penalties and more aggressive enforcement, the number of drug offenders in prison has skyrocketed to more than 11,000 -- roughly one out of every four inmates -- from just 673 in 1985. Meanwhile, high recidivism rates find roughly two out of every five of the 25,000 inmates released each year back in prison within three years.
Even without any further get-tough measures, the trends now in place mean the coming years will see steady increases in the number of inmates, leading to ever-growing costs to build and operate new prisons and fewer dollars for education, human services and other top priorities.
Illinois citizens and elected officials have a clear choice, the study notes: "Keep building more prisons and paying more to operate them each year, or find some way to slow down the influx of new inmates into an already crowded system."
Prison administrators and outside experts have been trying to send a similar message for years, but with limited success. Perhaps the most notable effort came from a task force headed by former U.S. Attorney Anton R. Valukas that in 1993 recommended more than two dozen reforms designed to reduce recidivism, provide more community-based sanctions and revise sentencing laws.
Legislators lost interest in reform after the 1994 election, however, when the "soft-on-crime" label helped beat both Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dawn Clark Netsch and state Rep. Thomas J. Homer, a Canton Democrat who championed the proposals. Many lawmakers saw the election results as a mandate to crack down even harder, leading to truth-in-sentencing and other get-tough measures.
But the average citizen may have a keener understanding of criminal justice issues than politicians realize, some researchers believe.
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Writing in the Southern Illinois University Law Journal last year, Jody L. Sundt argued it would be "erroneous" to suggest the public demands the wholesale incarceration of offenders.
"Instead, there is a growing body of research that indicates the public is open to the use of community-based sanctions and even prefers this type of sentence for nonviolent and less serious offenders," says Sundt, who teaches at the university's Carbondale campus.
In particular, she notes, the public likes requiring offenders to engage in hard work, to pay restitution and to perform community service. Moreover, support for such programs increases when the public is told about the cost of imprisonment, she reports.
The findings could be tested by the commission Gov. George Ryan named to rewrite the state's criminal code. Some criminal justice experts would like the panel to include in its finished product provisions to allow more extensive use of community-based sanctions. In some cases, they say, community service, restitution or probation would be appropriate; in others, electronic home detention or day reporting should be preferred. And most drug users belong in treatment centers, not prison cells.
Voting for such sentencing alternatives as part of a total rewrite of the criminal code, rather than as individual reform measures, would pose much less political risk for lawmakers, they note.
Meanwhile, corrections Director Donald N. Snyder Jr. and his aides are working to cut recidivism. Prison discipline has been tightened and education, vocational and drug treatment programs have been targeted toward inmates nearing the end of their sentences. Work release and parole have been revamped to offer intensive, community-based services to help released inmates become productive citizens.
"The state cannot build its way out of prison crowding," contends Snyder. "Other alternatives must be explored. In addition to being tough on crime in Illinois, we must be smart about crime."
Criminal justice experts and budget watchers alike hope that's a message the public will embrace.
Charles N. Wheeler III is director of the Public Affairs Reporting program at the University of Illinois at Springfield.
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