PRISON PROGRAMS COULD FACE CUTS

As Budget Hole Looms, Lawmakers May Halt Efforts to Reduce Recidivism

TALLAHASSEE - With more than 100,000 inmates in Florida prisons and
25,000 more expected in the next five years, lawmakers are
considering plans to further cut the programs that promise the best
chance for long-term savings - education and substance-abuse programs.

Already pruned in recent years, those programs are designed to
prepare inmates for life after prison and to prevent their return to crime.

While Gov. Charlie Crist has proposed maintaining the programs,
lawmakers are facing a $6 billion budget hole that demands deep cuts
in all public services unless they decide to raise taxes.

Like all agencies, the Department of Corrections has produced a plan
for a 15 percent budget cut.

DOC secretary Walt McNeil told lawmakers that such a cut would result
in closing prisons and releasing nearly 12,000 prisoners.

That is extremely unlikely to happen.

But McNeil also said that smaller budget cuts might mean reductions
in probation officers, substance-abuse programs and education programs.

"If you can't read, if you don't have any employable skills, if you
have a substance-abuse problem and you've spent three years in prison
and you come out and you still have those issues, what the heck are
you going to do?" said McNeil. "You're going to hit my mom or someone
else's mom or somebody's child over the head breaking into someone's
house. It is too costly to continue this uninformed way of trying to
fight crime."

But the debate over re-entry programs is only part of a growing
debate over whether Florida's "tough on crime" laws, including a
mandate that inmates spend 85 percent of their sentences behind bars,
have become too costly and too cruel.

Sen. Frederica Wilson, D-Miami, said that imprisoning mothers and
fathers who wrote bad checks or were simply with someone during a
drug arrest rips apart families and costs the state too much.

"I think it has a lot to do with the Republican Party trying to
protect their 'tough on crime' image and they don't understand that
what they're doing is a mockery of justice," said Wilson. "Having
100,000 people in prison is nothing to be proud of. It's outrageous."

Wilson and other Democrats are preparing a study that preliminarily
shows hundreds of millions of dollars could be saved by allowing the
early release of inmates who are first-time offenders with less than
two years remaining in their sentences and have had no disciplinary
problems in prison.

But Sen. Victor Crist, R-Temple Terrace, the chairman of the Senate
criminal justice appropriations committee, said the 85 percent
mandate is likely going to stay.

"I am confident that will not change, at least not in my lifetime," he said.

But Crist added that it may be time to look at easing sentences on
nonviolent crimes and reducing the influx of prisoners.

"What we do have is an option to look at the front door and whether
or not some of the sentencing (guidelines) that were necessary 10 or
15 years ago are still necessary today," said Sen. Crist.

McNeil withholds any personal opinions on whether allowing a low-risk
prisoners to leave before 85 percent of their sentence is complete
would affect public safety.

He said that his boss, Gov. Charlie Crist, has showed no sign of
softening on that number.

"I can't gauge where that should be; 85 (percent), 90, 75 . I don't
know," said McNeil.

But the former Tallahassee police chief said he remembers the days
when officers would see murderers back on the street just a few years
after they were sent to prison.

"I don't know where the pendulum needs to swing, but I don't want to
see it swing back to where we're releasing persons who committed
those crimes," said McNeil.

It costs taxpayers more than $19,000 annually to house one inmate.

That is almost equal to the total annual cost for an in-state student
at the University of Florida, including meals, housing, insurance and tuition.

Of the nearly 40,000 prisoners who will be released this year from
Florida prisons, more than one-third will return to prison and most
will do so within a few years.

Without the funding to increase re-entry preparation for inmates,
McNeil relies on more than 10,000 volunteers statewide to teach inmates.

He has created two facilities, Baker Correctional Institute in
northwest Florida and Demilly C.I. in Polk City, that focus on
inmates who will live in those areas by preparing them with intense
education and work skills.

Fran Barber, the DOC's deputy assistant secretary of institutions,
said the volunteer-based programs draw from retirees, teachers and
programs with sheriff's offices and community colleges.

The agency's goal is to reduce recidivism, the rate of prisoners who
return, from nearly 33 percent to 20 percent.

"We cannot continue to sit back and wait for funding," she said. "If
we had it, we could do it quicker. But it is too important to wait."

Some senators listening to McNeil's worst-case scenarios last week
were visibly stunned at the ramifications of the budget cuts.

They also heard other agency officials say that 15 percent cuts would
mean the end of the state's tracking of sex offenders and the closing
of youth detention centers, which would move teenagers farther away
from families.

"It is incredulous that we are at this point," said Sen. Arthenia
Joyner, D-Tampa. "I've been wondering why I couldn't sleep at night
and now I really know."

Joyner said Gov. Crist, who earned the nickname "Chain Gang Charlie"
for his tough on crime views as a senator in the 1990s, "has got to
say, 'Wait a minute. What I said about being Chain Gang Charlie 20
years ago won't fly today.'"

"We are not saying, 'Let everybody go free and forget about public
safety,'" said Joyner. "But I don't want to be a person that's part
of the demise of this great state."