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Three new state prisons, costing $600 million, will open about 2013, but even they may not be enough to reduce overcrowding, Corrections Superintendent Jeffrey Beard warned the Senate Judiciary Committee last week.
Beard said he's housing 1,800 more inmates than the existing 26 state prisons were built to hold. Even though the crime rate is down and the state's population has grown by only 4 percent since 1997, we now imprison 53 percent more people than we did 12 years ago.
Overcrowding has become so dire that Beard will soon be paying another state — New York and Michigan are in contention — to house 2,000 of our 51,000-plus inmates. Without sentencing reform, Beard warned, the state after 2013 will have to start building prisons at a rate of almost one a year at a cost of more than $200 million each.
Mandatory madness
To put $200 million in perspective, that's what legalization of table games would raise, yet construction of a single prison would take it all. Running each prison costs another $60 million a year.
Violent offenders aren't to blame for the need for more prison cells, Beard said. The problem lies with nonviolent drug and property offenders, who account for 55 percent of new admissions. Violent convicts make up only 2 percent of the growth.
Drug offenses now represent 22 percent of prison sentences, up from 17 percent in 1997, and 61 percent of all mandatory minimum sentences, up from 46 percent in 1997.
So it should be no surprise that the imposition of harsher and harsher penalties on drug offenders that began in the '80s succeeded in one thing: directing more and more scarce resources to prisons. Meanwhile, drug trafficking continued unimpeded.
If there was a benefit to a metastasizing penal system, it was the jobs that prisons brought to depressed Pennsylvania communities. Sending 2,000 inmates out of state defeats that purpose. Now revenue-strapped Pennsylvania will be giving another state a $60-million shot of economic stimulus.
The cash-for-convicts move is just the latest sign that excessively punitive sentencing and parole polices are short-sighted and unsustainable. We can't afford to build and run all of these prisons.
Momentum building
The good news is that there are alternatives for drug users that work better than locking them up.
Beard favors reserving incarceration for the worst of the worse and expanding treatment for the large numbers of less serious offenders whose criminal activity is fueled by substance abuse or mental illness.
Treatment is not only less costly than incarceration, Beard said, but it's also better at reducing repeat crime.
Sentencing reform that recognizes the futility of punishing addictive behavior appears to be where Sen. Stewart Greenleaf is headed.
"We have a criminal justice system that's based on punishment alone," said Greenleaf, a Montgomery County Republican and Judiciary Committee chair. "Punishment without rehabilitation is a failed system."
Other Republican senators, including Mike Brubaker and Mike Folmer, also are showing interest in reining in the costs of prisons.
In comments at a legislative breakfast, Folmer aptly cited Einstein's take on insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Spending more and more on prisons that aren't making us safer certainly fits that definition.
