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. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom