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| Editorial: Mistaken prison cuts |
| By freep.com - Editorials |
| Published: 05/23/2012 |
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Michigan -- With a corrections budget of $2 billion and nearly 44,000 inmates, Michigan is one of only four states that spend more on prisons than higher education. Legislators are right to want to spend a lot less, but corrections cuts included in the state House and Senate budget for next year take the state down a risky road by cutting rehabilitation programs and placing more state prison operations under the control of for-profit corporations. Meantime, the governor and Legislature have refused to engage in an important debate on sentencing policies that could safely reduce the prison population while saving taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. Private prisons can be costlier The House version of the Corrections budget includes closing Michigan Reformatory in Ionia and shifting its 1,300 inmates to a private prison to save an estimated $7.1 million. In the Senate version, 580 supervisors, librarians, secretaries, assistant resident unit managers and other support and program staff would be eliminated to save an estimated $58.8 million. These measures come on top of previous cuts in the prison education budget over the past five years, amounting to about one-third of the budget. Legislators continue to view privatization as a near-panacea for the state's budget woes, despite little or no evidence. In Arizona, for example, the Department of Corrections concluded that its private prisons ended up costing $1,600 more per inmate each year. Read More. |
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