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| Tougher good-time off law - cost $12.2M |
| By projo.com |
| Published: 04/21/2011 |
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PROVIDENCE — It could take 134 new positions and add $12.2 million to the next state budget — $23 million in fiscal 2013 — to implement proposed legislation in the General Assembly that would toughen the state prisons’ time-off-for-good-behavior system, the state Budget Office has estimated. But Amy Kempe, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Peter F. Kilmartin, whose office drafted the legislation, said that estimate was based on figures from the Corrections Department that, in Kilmartin’s opinion, overestimated the number of inmates affected by the proposal. The attorney general’s office and the Corrections Department were working to clarify the bill’s effects, she said. Kilmartin has never said the good-time changes wouldn’t cost more, she said, but not millions more. Kempe said Kilmartin believes that “it’s a cost worth paying” if increased corrections spending could keep violent and dangerous convicts like child murderer Michael Woodmansee imprisoned longer. Woodmansee is scheduled to be released in August after serving 28 years of a 40-year sentence for killing Jason Foreman. His early release prompted the legislation. Woodmansee has already legally accumulated his time off, however, and would be unaffected by any good-time policy changes. The state House sponsor of the Kilmartin legislation, Rep. Teresa Ann Tanzi, D-South Kingstown, said she, too, thought the Corrections Department figures were too high, particularly because informal discussions are already under way to pare back aspects of bill. Tanzi said she hoped targeted changes in the good-time policy, aimed at the most serious offenders, might be enacted this session and then a study committee could be put together to consider other, more wide-ranging changes. “I know there is an appetite to do it,” she said, “but also to do it well.” Kilmartin’s proposal would keep more prisoners in prison longer and, instead of simply letting them out at the end of their good-time shortened sentences, put them on parole for the period of their sentence shortened by good time. In a fiscal note prepared for the General Assembly, the Budget Office estimated it would take 30 new corrections officers to staff reopened parts of the Adult Correctional Institutions for more prisoners, 31 new parole department counselors, 15 more staffers for parole hearings, 12 people to do more detailed evaluations of inmate behavior and crime victim outreach as well as adding staff in several support areas. As proposed, the bill would make it harder for inmates imprisoned for certain violent crimes to get time off their sentences for good behavior and, rather than an inmate getting the current ten days off a month, the Corrections Department would be able to award between one to ten days off, at its discretion. Ellen Evans Alexander, assistant director of administration for the Corrections Department, said the problem with making the one-to-ten days discretionary was the department would have to keep more detailed records of inmate behavior to provide the legal justification for any time off decisions. Read More. |
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