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Prisons lock up tax dollars
By Scott Miller
Staff Writer
Virginia once faced the same costly problem with prison overcrowding that South Carolina is dealing with now. Now, Virginia leases nearly 1,200 beds annually to other states, said Rick Kern, director of the state’s Criminal Sentencing Division.
“We’re making money on those beds,” he said.
In South Carolina, millions of tax dollars potentially hang on the state’s ability to find a solution to prison overcrowding. Attorney General Henry McMasters recently presented a plan to reduce the overcrowding issue by eliminating parole and restructuring sentencing guidelines for nonviolent criminals.
But in Charleston County, officials are taking steps of their own to reduce the
overcrowding issue. The county was recently awarded a $90 million contract to extend its detention center. The project could cost as much as $108 million, and county leaders have called it a temporary solution to a much larger problem.
The facility was built to house about 660 inmates but twice that many reside there. The expansion, which won’t open until 2010, will add more than 1,300 beds.
Move over
Prison overcrowding is a common problem throughout the state, and it costs a lot of money even without figuring in the cost of building more jails.
On average, it costs South Carolina $19,000 per year to house one inmate. Currently, S.C. institutions are at 99.7% capacity, with more than 22,000 inmates serving time, according to data from the S.C. Department of Corrections. The annual cost to house these prisoners is roughly $418 million.
In Dorchester County, the detention center capacity is 156 inmates but has more than 260.
Berkeley County’s Hill-Finklea Detention Center houses about 430 criminals, nearly 300 more than it was built to hold, said Capt. Barry Currie, director of the jail.
The county will spend about $8 million to add 220 beds, he said, but that’s not enough.
“This is all we can afford right now. It’s just to give us a little breathing room,” he said. “I hate to say it, but you just have to build more jails.”
More jails? Maybe not
In 1994, Virginia abolished parole as part of a larger overhaul of its criminal justice system, a plan that McMaster is advocating.
Growth rates in the prison population began to decline because the state simply sent fewer nonviolent offenders to prison. Nonviolent offenders enter rehab at the behest of a judge, rather than being sent to prison, Kern said. Repeat offenses declined.
Violent offenders, meanwhile, remain in prison longer, without parole to bail them out, Kern said. Repeat offenses of violent crimes also declined.
Abolishing parole is a risky business, however. Several states have tried, and in some cases, as Currie worries, it backfired.
“Abolishing parole in my eyes is going to clog up prisons even more,” Currie said. “I hate to say it, but (parole) creates a revolving door.”
Florida abolished parole in 1983 and prisons became so overpopulated the state Legislature began enacting laws designed to release inmates early. The state reinstated parole a decade later. Connecticut and Colorado experienced similar outcomes.
Virginia learned from Florida’s mistakes, Kern said. The key was to re-evaluate the punishments for nonviolent crimes. The cost to keep a criminal in prison for one year is around $25,000 in Virginia, Kern said.
“(Lawmakers) didn’t want to spend that much in taxpayer dollars to punish someone for stealing cars, writing bad checks and things like that,” he said. “They wanted them punished, just not in an expensive prison bed.”
So when abolishing parole, the state directed nonviolent criminals convicted of drug, larceny and fraud offenses from prison to rehabilitation programs.
“That freed up thousands of beds for us. Our prison growth rates declined dramatically, and crime rates declined as well,” Kern said.
From 1985 to 1995, prison populations there increased 154%. After Virginia abolished parole, the population grew 31% from 1995 to 2004.
Those are the figures McMaster sees. While legislation has yet to surface showing the details, McMaster expects to pattern his plan after Virginia’s.
The idea is to offer “truth in sentencing,” to get tough on crime, McMaster said. The sentence a judge hands down should be the sentence a criminal serves, he said.
“Every time a judge issues a sentence … that judge is not telling the truth,” McMaster said at a recent stop in North Charleston. “Victims and their families every year have to relive these horrible memories by traveling to Columbia to protest the release (of criminals by the state’s parole board).”
But he also acknowledged overcrowding in state prisons and said if South Carolina needed to build more facilities, “we’ll do that. That is government’s No.1 responsibility, to keep the
public safe.
“I’m not going to worry about (cost). If they belong in jail, then that’s where they need to be, and we’ll pay the money happily,” McMaster said. “I think ultimately it will take pressure off the prisons.”
Rehab the system
To relieve prisons, the state would have to follow Virginia’s lead and re-evaluate the sentences given to nonviolent offenders like drug dealers.
McMaster’s plan calls for the creation of a statewide “middle court,” which would function like “drug courts” found in some counties. Through the middle court, judges would have the option to send nonviolent offenders to rehab rather than to jail, said Mark Plowden, a spokesman for McMaster. They don’t have that option now, he said.
The law would not define the exact nonviolent crimes eligible for the alternative sentences, Plowden said. That would be left to the discretion of the judge.
Sentencing criminals to rehabilitation rather than to prison could be a politically risky proposition.
“The bottom line is the public wants these drug dealers locked up too,” Currie said. “I’ve seen people go through rehab, and I hate to say it, but it’s a joke. I’ve been here 20 years, and I keep seeing the same people. The money’s too good for these people dealing drugs, and a lot of them don’t have anything else.”
Scott Miller is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at smiller@setcommedia.com.
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