CUTTING EDUCATION TO FEED PRISON INDUSTRY

Twenty-five years ago, Indiana spent $45 million a year to incarcerate
4,500 inmates. Today we are spending $600 million a year to incarcerate
20,000 inmates. According to the governor's statement this week on budget
cuts, the Department of Correction's budget has increased over the past
decade at nearly twice the rate of the rest of the budget.

When headlines recently declared, "Colleges brace for potential spending
cuts," education leaders must have cast an envious eye toward the
Department of Correction. Spending on prisons has increased more than twice
as fast as spending on higher education in Indiana since 1980. The question
is, have we put our money and our priorities in the right place?

Indiana is not alone in its budget woes, nor in the extent to which the
state's fiscal crisis is affected by spending on prisons. According to the
Justice Policy Institute, states are facing a combined shortfall of $38
billion. That is almost precisely the amount spent annually on prisons --
$40 billion compared to $5 billion in 1978.

The national prison boom has been driven by increasing incarceration of
non-violent offenders, especially drug offenders. While the number of
violent offenders sent to prison has nearly doubled, the number of
non-violent offenders has tripled, and the number of drug offenders has
increased 11-fold.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, non-violent offenders
account for about three-quarters of the increase in prisoners. The Justice
Department says half of all inmates in state prisons were convicted of
offenses that involved neither harm, nor the threat of harm, to another person.

Other states caught in the recession are re-evaluating their reliance on
prisons. Ohio, Michigan and Illinois (all with Republican governors) each
recently announced it will close entire prisons, with expected annual
savings of between $41 million and $55 million.

On Tuesday, Gov. Frank O'Bannon announced plans to shut down the
transitional unit at Westville and a medical unit at Wishard, for an annual
saving of $4 million. But no other closures are contemplated. Indeed, new
facilities are due to open in New Castle (a much-needed mental health unit)
and Peru.

However, last year the legislature passed, and the governor signed, a bill
that restores discretion in drug sentencing. By the repeal of mandatory
minimum sentences, judges will be able to decide on a case-by-case basis
whether to send drug addicts and small-time dealers to treatment programs
or community corrections instead of to prison. The law should in time
decrease demand for prison space.

Prisons are effective means of isolating predatory individuals from the
world outside (although often not from potential victims within the prison
world). The problem with prisons as a front-line defense against crime is
that they are extraordinarily expensive and relatively ineffective in
reforming their captives.

A former commissioner of corrections in Indiana, Jim Aiken, used to say
that he calculated how many prison beds we would need 10 years down the
track by knowing the number of at-risk fourth-graders in the state. Failure
to meet the needs of vulnerable children is one of the key factors that
determine the eventual number of juvenile delinquents and adult criminals.

The irony is, if in a time of scarcity we cut education, mental health,
housing and other social services in order to expand and sustain a bloated
prison system, we may in the long run undermine rather than enhance public
safety.