4-13-2009 Arizona:
Fewer prisoners, fewer corrections officers, fewer programs.
Administrators at the state Department of Corrections know cuts are coming. The reductions could range from $40 million to more than $185 million, depending on how much legislators decide to cut.
With these figures in mind, prison officials are pushing to protect as many correction-officer positions as possible and find savings in areas that would not impact staffing.
If the state orders the department to cut 20 percent from its annual budget of more than $900 million, staffing won't be an issue: Cuts that deep would require rewriting the state's criminal code to allow the early release of some low-level offenders and closing a handful of prisons, officials said.
The state's prison system houses more than 30,000 inmates in state-owned facilities and another 8,000 in private facilities. Officials anticipate Arizona's prison population will continue to grow, reaching more than 38,000 by the end of 2011.
Filling the void of corrections officers has been an ongoing struggle for the state, which has seen the number of working officers level out at about 5,000 during the last few years.
"From my perspective, the Department of Corrections is a public-safety agency charged with maintaining effective custody and control of just under 40,000 prisoners," said Corrections Director Charles Ryan. "We are able to do this through our inmate-classification system, our physical plants and, most importantly, our correctional staff. We cannot do this without a well-trained staff."
Looking for ways to save
After the Joint Legislative Budget Committee in January proposed eliminating more than 600 correction-officer positions, prison administrators came up with other cost-cutting measures to demonstrate 5 to 20 percent budget reductions. They include:
• Eliminating prisoner programs, including a special treatment for sex offenders and a work-based education program, which serves more than 2,000 inmates per day.
• Reducing or removing incentives for officers, a move that could include eliminating uniform allowances and retention bonuses.
• Charging inmates Arizona Healthcare Cost Containment System rates for medical care for a savings of up to $28 million.
• Releasing 3,000 to 9,500 inmates from state custody and place them into some combination of county custody, house arrest or community supervision.
(eAdvocate Post)
Fear of increased violence
Cutting positions should be at the bottom of legislators' list, Ryan said.
"If that comes to pass, it's likely that the assaults of inmates against inmates are going to increase in the lower- and the medium-custody units, and the assaults against our staff may increase as well," he said.
Following the longest prison standoff in U.S. history, when two prisoners took Officer Lois Fraley hostage and held her in a tower for 15 days at the Arizona State Prison Complex-Lewis in 2004, elected officials made a concerted effort to boost correction officers' pay and improve retention in the hopes of increasing staffing levels and reducing the number of assaults.
More than five years later, inmate assaults on staff and each other have increased.
Recruitment: Bad to worse
Efforts to increase staffing levels at the 10 state-owned prisons also fell short, a result of weak pay, Ryan said.
Even when the economy is humming, it's hard to convince people to take relatively low-paying jobs that come with some safety risks in locations far from large population centers.
Now that the economy is sputtering, the state could not afford to fill those positions even if there were demand.
Corrections officials estimate that one in 17 staff members will get assaulted on the job this fiscal year, up from the one in 41 staff members assaulted five years ago, according to documents prison officials shared with legislators.
Early release is an option
The early release of thousands of prisoners is at the bottom of the list, but is a possibility.
The proposal is not unique to Arizona: Corrections officials in other states also are considering early release to cut spending.
In Arizona, legislators would have to rewrite criminal laws, which could result in the release of thousands of prisoners.
There is some support in the Legislature to at least consider the idea, said Cecil Ash, a former public defender and first-term representative from Mesa.
Ash saw firsthand the impact sentencing laws can have on the prison population when one of his clients pleaded to an eight-year sentence for stealing a bicycle, the client's third strike.
"He was just a fellow who was just stupid and lazy," Ash said. "He deserves a penalty, but I'm not one to spend $40,000 a year on that kind of guy."
Ash stressed that nobody wants to release prisoners who are violent or who pose a threat to the public.
"But there are a lot of people in prison, I'm afraid, that shouldn't be there," Ash said. "It's not worth the cost to the state because they're not that severe a threat to the public." ..News Source.. by JJ Hensley
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