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December 14, 2006
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Patricia Caruso has been director of the Michigan Department of Corrections since 2003. (2003 photo by AL GOLDIS/Associated Press) |
Patricia Caruso became the first female director of the Michigan Department of Corrections in July 2003. Here are excerpts of her conversation last week with Free Press Editorial Writer Jeff Gerritt about the recent jump in the state's prison population and how the state can better control prison costs of $1.9 billion a year, 20% of the state's general purpose revenues.
QUESTION: Michigan has one of the nation's highest incarceration rates and now holds a record 51,044 inmates. The department managed to control the inmate population fairly well in recent years, recording slight decreases in 2003 and 2004.
But the population spiked this year, following the mistaken release of Patrick Selepak, who later killed three people. The state added 1,700 inmates in the first 10 months of 2006, and the population is now where it was projected to be in 2008. Can you explain what's happening to Michigan's prison population trends?
ANSWER: We have done a good job over the past few years in stabilizing and even decreasing our population. We did it with our re-entry program, working closely with community corrections, and working with our agents in dealing with parole violators. We held to our projections until Selepak hit. You can attribute almost all of the increase to that. We're now about 1,300 beds over our projected population. In March, we went up 500 beds in one month.
Q: How did Selepak affect that increase?
A: That's the human element of our business. When you look at 6 1/2 weeks of headlines, it impacts everyone's decisions, including (parole) agents, parole board members and judges. We've slowed that down some, but we're still going up.
Q: How is the department handling the increase short-term?
A: What we've done this year is expand within our existing facilities. Most of our prisons are designed to flex a bit. We still have some empty beds. We are not going to stack people. As a former warden, I know it's dangerous to run prisons like that. It's wrong for staff and for inmates.
Q: I've received dozens of letters from inmates, describing increasingly crowded conditions. Do you think the growing population is causing a security problem?
A: No, I don't. Certainly, there are people who disagree. We added staff in the areas where we (expanded). We've worked with the union about what we needed to do. When you compare our staffing ratios to most states, we still look pretty favorable.
Q: What are you doing, long-term, to control the number of inmates?
A: If we hadn't done what we did, we'd probably be at 55,000 inmates today. We're putting a lot of effort into our Michigan Prisoner Re-entry Initiative. It's about getting them out and keeping them out. Communities, prosecutors, judges, police and legislators have embraced this effort. We need to do some things differently to ensure that people who get out don't commit more crimes. Maybe 75% of the people in prison have substance abuse problems. Then there's the mentally ill (an estimated 25% of the prison population). One of the focuses of re-entry is getting the mentally ill out of prison and finding the right structure in the community for them so that they can exist as law-abiding citizens while dealing with their mental illness. Re-entry programs change the whole atmosphere of a prison. We have a 48% recidivism rate. If we cut that by only 10%, it would save a lot of money and make our communities much safer.
Q: The U.S. Justice Department recently reported that a record 7 million people -- one in every 32 American adults -- were behind bars, on probation or on parole. The United States has the world's highest incarceration rate, and a disproportionate number of those in prison are African-American and poor people. In some communities, going to prison has become the norm. Does that trouble you?
A: I talk about this publicly all the time, and it troubles me a lot. I was a warden for a long time and I'm OK with locking people up. I know some people need to be locked up and stay there. But how do we reconcile being the greatest country in the world and yet lock up so many people? If what we got in return for that high incarceration rate was a crime-free society, I'd say that would be a good investment. But that's not what we get for it. It's kind of the opposite, and that's the problem.
Clearly, when you look at the numbers in our country, there has to be another answer. One of the big problems is that the kids of incarcerated people are also sentenced and, later, many times more likely to be incarcerated themselves. It's not the child's fault, and many of the people in prison were born into the same circumstances. We've normalized going to prison in this country. Think of how many young people expect to go to prison now.
Q: There are going to be pressures on the Corrections budget. The biggest savings come from keeping prison populations down. But are you worried that legislators might look, instead, at cutting vital programs such as education and re-entry, which ultimately will lead to a larger system?
A: Absolutely I'm afraid of that. How many times has our education budget been on the block? I'm afraid our efforts on re-entry could go by the wayside. None of those are good solutions.
Q: Are you committed to staying on for four more years?
A: That's the governor's decision, not mine. This has been a hard year, but I've never faltered in my dedication to this department and I'm still really honored to have this opportunity.
Q: The Free Press editorial page has written a highly critical series on prison health care. Can you respond?
A: Your columns on health care have implied that we don't care, or I don't care, and that's not true. ... I think we have good, caring professionals who work in a really difficult environment. I think we do provide good health care and good access to care for prisoners. The governor has called for an independent review, which I'm really welcoming at this point, because I need some partners to help me look at the system.
Copyright © 2006 Detroit Free Press Inc.