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Sat, 17 Nov 2007
Getting serious about state spending
[Appeared first in the Woonsocket Call, Pawtucket Times, etc.]
When you talk with people for any length about the state budget, unions are bound to come up. When you talk with people for any length about unions in the state, the Brotherhood of Corrections Officers is bound to come up.
In many ways,the Brotherhood is among the more militant of the state's public employee unions. Plus, a crowd of prison guards is just a teensy bit more imposing than a crowd of teachers, so they get press. They have been in the news over the last few years for helping prevent the establishment of halfway houses in Rhode Island and for contracted work rules that force the extensive use of overtime at the state prisons. As a result, few people find it surprising that, after accounting for inflation, we spend 160% more on the state prisons now than we did 20 years ago.
But what might be a surprise is that 160% is just about the increase we've seen in the number of inmates since then: from 1528 in 1988 to 3937 in September, about 95% of capacity. The number of people on probation and parole is up 170%, from 10,000 to 27,000. That is, after inflation, we spend about the same per prisoner now as we did 20 years ago. The real problem is that we have a lot more prisoners.
Why are there so many more? It's largely because in 1988, we passed legislation establishing a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years for people convicted of possession of as little as one ounce of heroin or cocaine. That year we also amended the state constitution to deny bail for drug offenses where the potential sentence was 10 years or more. Not surprisingly, the prison populations shot up, fast. In 1988, we had 87 women in our prisons, and one year later there were 215.
But it sounds tough on crime, right? Well crime did go down in the 1990's, across the nation, and part of the reason was that lots of criminals were in prison. But it's a pretty expensive strategy for fighting crime. We could get a lot more bang for the buck by using that money to hire more police officers. We have expanded our police departments, but the towns who can afford to do it tend not to be where the crime is, so Glocester has three new police officers since 2000 while Woonsocket has only one.
Drug treatment programs would be another way to save money. It costs less to help someone get over a drug habit than it does to put him or her in prison. But there's "no money" for that, of course, and what few programs we do have in the state can handle only a tiny fraction of the demand. There's more: our probation system is huge and contains some serious injustices that fill up our prisons. Around 40% of our inmate population is probation violators.
So this is the way it works: You could try to blame the Brotherhood for the high cost of our prisons if you want to, and people do that all the time. But what the data shows is that the most you can blame them for is not letting us cut the cost of our prisons. There most certainly are work rules that should be addressed and the Brotherhood's definition of who is supervising prisoners is more restrictive than one I'd suggest, but the truth is that over the past 20 years, for all their strength, they have only been able to hold the line. As usual, the people who spend all their time blaming unions for our budget woes are just trying to distract you from the expensive decisions that have been made.
Some of these decisions were made a long time ago, but most have been endorsed recently. Last spring, the legislature repealed the 1988 mandatory minimum drug laws. The Governor vetoed the repeal, so the minimums remain on the books. The Assembly met a couple of weeks ago to override a bunch of vetoes, but this wasn't one of them.
And how about that I-way? Here's a hugely expensive project that gave us a new-and-improved bridge but only minor modifications to the capacity of our two biggest roads. Now that the first bit of it has opened, we've all enjoyed a week's worth of new-and-improved traffic jams. Projections are that the project will cost well over $700 million, and probably much more by the time it is done and its bonds are paid off. It was originally proposed as a more fiscally prudent choice than $50 million to repair the existing bridge over the Providence River. The Department of Transportation has some serious issues with the union work rules it has established over the years, but they are small beer compared to the mighty I-boondoggle.
So here's an easy way to tell whether people are serious about addressing the spending side of the state's budget crisis. If they want to talk about the expensive policy decisions we've made over the past twenty years, and also want to talk about contracted work rules or seniority provisions, then humor them. They might have a good list of suggestions. But if they tell you that unions are the big problem, they aren't serious. It's just that simple.
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