Tuesday, Jul. 08, 2008

Legislature can’t dodge blame for prison woes

THE PRISON SYSTEM has never been a popular supplicant at the State House. Those most affected by the agency’s funding level don’t tend to vote, don’t hand out campaign donations or hire popular lobbyists, and they don’t generate a lot of public sympathy. So for as long as we can remember, our Legislature has spent less than it should to keep the prisons safe — much less provide education, job training and drug treatment so there will be some hope that prisoners who are eventually released won’t fall back into a life of crime.

The situation has only deteriorated since the Legislature handed control of the Corrections Department over to the governor in 1993. In the years since, lawmakers have come to consider all Cabinet agencies to be “the governor’s agencies.” A perverted sense of “accountability” makes them somehow believe they have no responsibility for what happens in those agencies, never mind that they still control the purse strings and write the laws under which agencies operate.

Even against this backdrop, though, Senate Finance Chairman Hugh Leatherman’s latest demand for a financial search for “mismanagement” at the Corrections Department is breathtaking for its head-in-the-sand, buck-passing arrogance. Unlike earlier comments made to a reporter, there is no way to assume the senator was letting his mouth get ahead of his brain, or even being quoted out of context, when he dismissed the governor’s charge, at a recent Budget and Control Board meeting, that the Legislature was shorting the prisons.

As with any good subterfuge, there’s a grain of truth to Mr. Leatherman’s charge that Corrections Director Jon Ozmint created the funding problem by asking the Legislature for less money than he needed. Early on, Mr. Ozmint did lowball his budget requests. But he hasn’t done that recently, and the Legislature has consistently given him less than he asked for — this year reducing funding for 2008-09 by $7 million even as the agency was coming up $4 million short on its 2007-08 budget. If anything, his earlier lowball requests should make his complaints all the more believable.

As Mr. Ozmint explained in a recent letter to the board: “(S)ince 1999 our inmate count has risen by 4,000 inmates. Our funding has been reduced by over $120 million in inflation adjusted dollars and in actual dollars we are still millions ($40 million) below 1999 funding levels. Then, our per-inmate spending ranked among the bottom four states in the nation. Today, we are even lower. No other legislature in the nation provides less per capita funding for corrections: not one!”

Few organizations are entirely free of mismanagement or waste, but if there is any in the prisons, it couldn’t come close to accounting for the deficits.

Painful as it may be, most agencies can tighten their belts: The courts can make people wait longer for a hearing, schools can cancel summer school, the Highway Patrol can reduce its force, and SLED can cut back on investigations. But with spending per inmate down to $14 per day, the Corrections Department can’t cut anymore. When a new prisoner shows up at the door, Mr. Ozmint can’t ask him to come back next month.

Yet even knowing this, the Legislature keeps sending him more prisoners. And cutting his budget. And then blaming him when the numbers don’t add up. Maybe that helps lawmakers sleep better at night, but it will never change the fact that the worst of mismanagement within the agency would fade into insignificance compared to the Legislature’s own dereliction.