MORE HARMFUL PRISON CUTS

Though justified given budget straits, getting rid of accreditation in
prisons will inevitably hurt the agency.

Prison accreditation is a painstaking, expensive process that gives the
public this invaluable benefit: It determines, through objective measure,
whether a correctional institution is meeting basic industrywide standards
and a range of best practices. In the end, accreditation is an independent
validation essential to the pursuit of professionally run prisons.

So it is regrettable that the state Department of Corrections, in a
cost-saving move, has refused to renew accreditation at four facilities
scheduled for review. The decision not to seek accreditation from the
American Correctional Association will save Corrections $250,000.

Given the financial pressures under which Corrections is forced to operate,
it is likely the department also will decline to seek re-accreditation for
the 11 prisons scheduled to renew the process next fiscal year.

Corrections must cut costs. The department would prefer to alleviate
overcrowding, hire more guards and preserve its educational and
rehabilitation programs. So by comparison, accreditation should be
considered nonessential. The agency is one of the hardest hit by state
budget cuts. It sits in a $28 million hole, as the Legislature has pared
$30 million from the Corrections budget over the past two years.

Because Corrections is being forced to remake itself to fit within its
budget, ironically, accreditation may be even more useful now. Judging by a
string of recent assaults on both staff and inmates, safety has become an
issue as the inmate-to-guard ratio has ballooned to nearly twice the
national average. A new director and new administration's efforts to reform
the agency would be helped by the accreditation process.

Corrections director Jon Ozmint says the task of monitoring and evaluating
institutional operations will become an entirely internal matter. While
such self-evaluation has its own value, the most complete and accurate
appraisals are more likely to come from an independent review of
operations. The more rigorous internal reviews Ozmint promises are not a
substitute for that independence. The public has come to trust
accreditation as an objective eye able to independently measure strengths
and weaknesses.

Included among the four that will likely lose accreditation soon is Perry
Correctional Institution in Pelzer. Next year the list is likely to
increase by 11, and the future accreditation of all 29 state prisons is in
doubt. But this is certain: The public, as well as the agency, will lose a
valuable measure of how well each institution is performing.