Pubdate: Fri, 13 Jun 2003
Source: Post-Crescent, The (Appleton,  WI)
Copyright: 2003 The Post-Crescent
Contact:  http://www.wisinfo.com/postcrescent/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1443

OPENING PRISONS BAD BUT ONLY OPTION

The state Legislature's Joint Finance Committee wants to bring home 
Wisconsinites who are imprisoned in other states. There are about 3,000 of 
them, separated from their families by hundreds or thousands of miles, and 
while we have them stored in Oklahoma, Tennessee and Minnesota, prisons and 
jail cells stand empty in Wisconsin.

This bizarre and inhumane fiasco started in the mid-90s, when 
tough-on-crime initiatives overtook our prison capacity. The prison 
population grew from 7,000 in 1990 to 20,447 in 2000. In 1996, we began 
sending medium and minimum-security prisoners out of state.

To handle the population, the state began building prisons, and counties 
began furiously building jails. Counties that had spare cells soon found 
that they could turn a profit renting them out. Some counties built new 
jails specifically to cash in. By 2000, more than half the counties in the 
state had built new jails. Meanwhile, the state built eight new prisons and 
bought a ninth.

With more than enough cells, you'd think the out-of-state prisoners would 
have come home. But while the building boom was going on, the state found 
out it cost less to keep prisoners out of state than to incarcerate them in 
Wisconsin. We pay the Corrections Corporation of America to take care of 
prisoners out of state. The state pays CCA pays $48.50 a day. Keeping 
inmates in Wisconsin prison costs about $71 a day.

Why? The state's Legislative Audit Bureau investigated in 1997 and found 
that the variables in programs and accounting and security levels made 
comparison extremely difficult. We don't, for example, send the worst 
prisoners out of state. But, for whatever reason, it's still so much 
cheaper that we haven't opened prisons in Stanley or New Lisbon.

We shouldn't have built them in the first place. The people for whom we 
built all of those cells are nonviolent offenders. Between 1990 and 2000, 
the violent crime rate dropped from 264.7 crimes per 100,000 of population 
to 236.8 - 53 percent below the U.S. average. During the same period, the 
incarceration rate increased 131 percent, nearly four times the national 
average.

But we have them now, and we're boxed into bad choices. We could delay 
opening the Stanley and New Lisbon prisons, as Gov. Jim Doyle wants, until 
July 2005 and save $29 million. Or we can do as the finance committee 
suggests and open the prisons, put people to work and bring the 
out-of-state prisoners home.

The finance committee's plan is the lesser of the evils, and at this point, 
the moral high road.

Our elected officials could keep us out of these messes in the future if 
they'd consider building anything -- prisons, schools or offices -- the 
course of last resort. We could have saved ourselves a fortune if we'd 
invested in drug treatment, instead of bricks and mortar and bars.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom