GO SLOW ON INMATE MOVES

There are almost 1,400 Wisconsin inmates being held in out-of-state jail
cells. But those numbers could more than double within a year if the state
Department of Corrections gets its way.

The department this week received approval from the Legislature's Joint
Finance Committee to spend $30 million and send 1,000 more inmates to cells
in Oklahoma and Tennessee. And the department plans to request permission by
January to export a thousand more prisoners.

Corrections Secretary Mike Sullivan points to a crowding crisis in the state
prison system. A system designed for 9,600 inmates now houses 16,200.

But new prisons and inmate transfers have yet to reduce crowding -- they
simply clear space for more prisoners, and run up costs even further.

What is needed is a re-examination of sentencing guidelines, and of the
corrections system in general. Wisconsin must seek innovative alternatives
to the pattern of constantly expanding the corrections budget.

Until the corrections system is re-examined, state officials need to go slow
on inmate transfers, since they do not appear to represent a logical or a
practical solution to the crisis.

Wisconsin's experiment with inmate transfers has been costly and
controversial. It has put Wisconsin prisoners in systems that do not
maintain this state's standards, thus raising the prospect that Wisconsin
could be subjected to the sort of lawsuits that are common in Southern
states. The experiment also separates inmates from loved ones -- thus
straining ties with the communities they must re-enter upon release.

The challenges posed by such separations will be increased if the Department
of Corrections goes ahead with a plan, shelved for now, to send women
inmates to out-of-state prisons for the first time. This could potentially
separate them from their children, a move that cannot be seen as wise.

In addition to the concerns about costs, standards and rehabilitation that
this experiment raises, there are legitimate worries about the use of the
transfer system to punish inmates who speak out on issues of prison conditions.

It may be true that some savings are achieved by sending inmates to other
states, but the costs to the reputation of Wisconsin's corrections system
and our communities could well exceed those savings. We won't know for sure
until this experiment with prisoner transfers has gone on long enough to be
seriously assessed by independent analysts.

Until such an assessment has been performed, it would be foolish to pour
millions of additional Wisconsin tax dollars into an experiment that could
yet turn out to be for the worse.

Checked-by: Melodi Cornett