LIGHTS OUT ON COMMON SENSE

Facing a budget crisis, politicians want to cut the state prison
budget. But how they want to do it is like cutting calories by washing
down a dozen chocolate donuts with a diet Vernors. Michigan's bloated
prison system is bankrupting the state. To fix it, the state must come
up with better ideas than unplugging water coolers to save
electricity.

Locking up a record 51,500 inmates costs nearly $2 billion a year.
That's about $5 million a day -- more than taxpayers spend on higher
education. Michigan imprisons 40% more people than other Great Lakes
states that have less crime, taking an extra $500 million a year out
of the state's general fund.

Advertisement But the latest Department of Corrections plan to reduce
costs is no more than punitive penny-pinching. To save electricity,
the department is directing wardens to, among other things, remove
refrigerated vending machines from visiting rooms, snuff out lighted
holiday displays, unplug watercoolers, cut off night-time power to
cells, and even limit the use of floor buffers.

Are dirty prisons worth saving small change on power?

Even some employees are uneasy about changes that will increase
institutional tension and in some cases endanger health and safety.

But it's open season on inmates. Prisoners and their families have no
constituency or political juice. Term-limited legislators, looking for
any chance to appear tough on crime, have little to lose. Any idea to
cut costs without closing prisons, no matter how whack, will get a
hearing.

Even in better times two years ago, House Republicans tried to cut GED
and other prison education and training programs, ignoring common
sense and every study that shows education reduces recidivism.

You can best believe that the $190 million spent on inmate health care
will also be on the block. State Sen. Bruce Patterson, R-Canton,
recently called U.S. District Judge Richard Enslen "totally out of
control" and "not quite lucid" while blaming the judge for high prison
health care costs. Patterson, who could have been describing himself,
is apparently upset because Enslen ordered a few changes after a
21-year-old mentally ill inmate I wrote about last August, Timothy Joe
Souders, died after spending most of his last four days strapped down
in a hot isolation cell, soaked in his own urine.

If Patterson gets his way, the entire prison health care system could,
and should, end up under federal control, as it is in California. Then
watch costs go up.

The only way to save serious money is to release people who don't
belong behind bars, close prisons and, to protect public safety,
reinvest part of the savings into community programs and supervision.
Over the next decade, the state can do that by revising sentencing
guidelines, strengthening re-entry programs, granting medical
commutations, expanding drug courts and other community alternatives
to incarceration, and paroling some of the 15,000 inmates who have
served longer than their minimum sentence.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm plans to close Southern Michigan Correctional
Facility and at least one more prison this year by commuting the
sentences of 500 sick and dying inmates and paroling some nonviolent
offenders. Those include inmates convicted of retail fraud, forgery,
drug possession or failure to pay child support. Shutting down the
Jackson prison would save $35 million a year.

Meantime, Senate Majority Leader Mike Bishop, R-Rochester, and Sen.
Alan Cropsey, R-DeWitt, a voice of relative reason on corrections
issues, both told me this week that Republicans would try to avoid
closing prisons. Bishop appointed a corrections subcommittee that will
recommend, within two weeks, other cost-cutting measures, including
privatizing prison food service operations and banning inmate contact
sports to lower medical costs.

I'll wait to see the report, but I don't believe the state can keep
every institution open and make $92 million in cuts without turning its
nearly 50 prisons into dangerous and dysfunctional warehouses that spit
out convicts unprepared for anything but a life of crime. Instead,
Michigan's politicians should ask what Rich Studley, vice president of
the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, asked last December: "Why is it that
Michigan, compared to other states, puts more people in prison for
longer periods of time for no difference in crimes rates or recidivism?"

Answering that will take rare virtues in politics -- courage and
common sense -- but it could also take Michigan a long way toward
solving its structural budget problem.

Shutting off prison water coolers isn't going to cut it.