A plan for prisons

Educate, medicate and incarcerate. It's what governors do.

John Brummett is blogging daily online.

As for education: Adequate public school funding in Arkansas is now pretty much taken off the top of the state general revenue budget by the settlement of the Lake View case. At least it's supposed to be done that way, and we could well wind up back in court if that's not so.

As for medication: Gov. Asa Hutchinson has managed to defer the epic issue of Medicaid spending to a task force and a fiscal cliff in 2017. That fan won't be hit for a while.


So on Wednesday morning Hutchinson stepped into his conference room to confront a large crowd awaiting his announcement of a plan for what to do about the third main part of his job--incarceration.

The challenge of exploding prison populations and costs has beset every governor I've covered. At least no wild-man county sheriff had yet chained any prisoners to the fence of one of Asa's state prisons--or, to be fair, the ones he inherited from Mike Beebe, whose alternative sentencing reforms for nonviolent offenders don't seem to have solved anything.

This issue always pits the right and the left, of course.

The right says we coddle these guys in jail and could imprison them more cheaply. But we operate under a federal court consent decree requiring a certain humanity in treatment.

The left says we need to spend less for new prison construction and more to educate and rehabilitate, as if the guy on parole and committing murder could be put in an expanded pre-K program and transformed by happy association with 4-year-olds.

These are entirely different things--dealing with today's convicted criminal and trying to keep today's child from becoming tomorrow's criminal. You don't solve today's prison crowding problem by giving today's child a vital better chance.

False choices: They are the very bane of sound policymaking.

So here is Asa's plan: He found $31 million lying around in reserves at the state Insurance Department, which began in 1993 living off its own income generation rather than general revenue.

The money comes from fees--excess fees, it seems--paid by insurance agents and companies. Mostly the reserves provide a savings account for state government.

So the next time a bad guy goes to prison, you should thank your insurance agent. Or your own premiums, which perhaps reflect these fees.

Hutchinson proposed to use this money to open new prison beds here and there, piecemeal-style, nearly 800 altogether. That includes a farming out of nearly 300 of our prisoners to Bowie County, Tex., which will do the job for a lesser charge per-prisoner than what our state prison system sustains.

But Asa said we can't go on this way, just expanding and expanding, which is what every governor since the 1980s has said.

Currently we get back 43 percent of the inmates we parole, and we must get that percentage down, the new governor said.

So he wants to use a little of that $31 million to open pre-release centers where 500 pending parolees at a time will get substance-abuse treatment, job training and placement, mentoring and whatever religious ministries--which is not to be proselytizing--that the state can persuade churches to come in and provide.

Four in five of these parolees have substance-abuse histories. If you don't fix that, there's an odds-on chance the parolee will wind up back in the same old bad place doing the same old bad thing, and we'll be looking for yet another stash of loose change under the Insurance Department's sofa cushions.

Hutchinson also proposed to set aside money to work some more on alternative sentencing for nonviolent offenders and to keep tabs more efficiently on parolees.

It's a good-enough plan by a practical-enough governor for a bad-enough problem. And as Asa candidly admitted: What he proposes may not make any difference, but we must try.

One of Hutchinson's key aides has expressed surprised amusement that his boss, a noted conservative, could seem to find himself to the left of a supposedly liberal columnist on the criminal-justice issue of imprisonment versus alternatives.

Again, the choice is false.

As always, it's simple arithmetic. We currently have more people who are supposed to be in prison than we have current space to put them. So you have to work out that equation even as you seek to do better jobs raising up a new generation and giving today's parolees a fighting chance to avoid the costly revolving door.

So let's give it a try--our new governor's reasonable proposed distribution of these insurance agents' kind contributions, I mean.

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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 02/22/2015

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