Detroit Free Press - www.freep.com - Budget crisis may finally force some commonsense changes

Budget crisis may finally force some commonsense changes

February 8, 2007

Michigan's painful budget crisis is about to slap some sense into politicians, including Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who face an exploding prison population.

Over the past three decades, Michigan's race to lock people up and throw away the key has been driven by fear and by politicians who exploit that fear. They've resisted reforms, served up some of the nation's toughest sentencing and parole policies, and made Michigan a national leader in incarceration. With a record 51,500 inmates, the state now spends nearly $2 billion a year, or $5 million a day, on prisons -- more than it spends on higher education. Facing a $3-billion budget hole, Michigan can no longer afford it.

Maybe these policies would have been worth all that paper if they had made our communities safe, but they have not. Despite having the Midwest's highest incarceration rate, Michigan has higher crime rates than its neighbors. What we've done simply hasn't worked.

Granholm hinted in Tuesday's State of the State address that she's finally ready to change course. Her administration will roll out some overdue reforms, including medical commutations for inmates who are too old or too sick to threaten anyone, revising sentencing guidelines, and beefing up efforts to help parolees stay out of prison. That's all good. Michigan's 300 sickest and oldest inmates cost the state $30 million a year. Keeping most of them locked up is costly, senseless and inhumane.

Reworking sentencing guidelines to divert more nonviolent offenders into lower-cost community programs would save hundreds of prison beds. Michigan added more than 2,000 state prisoners last year, many of them minor offenders with one-year sentences or less who should have been supervised in community programs.

Finally, spending more on the Michigan Prisoner Re-Entry Initiative will ensure that fewer of the 11,000 people who get out of prison each year end up back behind bars -- at a cost of $30,000 each per year.

Still, the state must go much further. Adopting the federal standard for truth-in-sentencing, for example, making inmates parole eligible after serving 85% of their sentence, would save Michigan $100 million a year. More than 15,000 prisoners are beyond their first parole eligibility date, and the Parole Board could safely release some of them.

Truth be told, Michigan's criminal justice policies have put our communities more at risk. High incarceration rates have made going to prison normal in some neighborhoods and left tens of thousands of children with imprisoned parents far more likely to go to prison themselves. My 34-year-old brother-in-law once told me that he didn't know one peer from his east-side Detroit neighborhood who hadn't gone to prison or jail.

"Some of these kids talk about catching a case like it was going to a Boy Scout meeting," Carl Taylor, an activist scholar at Michigan State University, told me this week. "Prison has become a norm, and no one's paying attention."

I don't expect Granholm or any other politician to be moved by the social costs of Michigan's race to incarcerate, but I do expect them to show common sense, and even courage, in a fiscal crisis. The bottom line is this: Safely reducing our incarceration rates to the level of neighboring states would save Michigan $500 million a year -- money that could be better spent on education, transportation, health care needs or even a tax cut.

JEFF GERRITT is a Free Press editorial writer. Contact him at gerritt@freepress.com or 313-222-6585.