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.