Mixed views on closing two Pennsylvania prisons in neighboring counties

What has turned out to be one of the more controversial pieces of Gov. Josh Shapiro’s 2025-2026 budget proposal was never mentioned during his 90-plus minute speech laying out the spending plan this past week, according to the Pennsylvania Capital Star.

In budget documents, the governor proposed closing two Pennsylvania prisons, which his office says could save the state $100 million per year. He also proposed closing two community corrections centers for another $10 million in annual savings. The Shapiro administration has said falling incarceration rates in Pennsylvania make the closures possible. 

But the proposal has drawn varied reactions. The prison guards’ union has come out strongly against it, though the Department of Corrections said in an email to employees that all current workers would be able to hold on to a job with the same pay if they choose. Advocates for prisoners in Pennsylvanians have expressed cautious optimism that the move could improve lives in prisons, depending on how it’s done. And some lawmakers who represent districts with prisons in them have expressed concern about the economic impacts on nearby communities. 

The Department of Corrections says the specific facilities have yet to be chosen based on the recommendation of a “steering committee.”

‘Depends on how it’s executed’

Whether or not the move improves conditions for inmates by increasing access to rehabilitative programming and avoiding overcrowding in part depends on the durability of the trend of decreasing incarceration, as well as how the prisons slated for closure are chosen. How the plan is enacted could also have major impacts on communities with economies that rely on those prisons.

“Anything depends on how it’s executed,” said Claire Shubik-Richards, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, a nonprofit that offers support services for incarcerated Pennsylvanians and their families, including prison monitoring, transportation for visitation and mentoring. 

In theory, Shubik-Richards approves of the idea to close the prisons.

“Most states, including Pennsylvania, have seen the footprint of their state prison population shrink,” Shubik-Richards said. “So this is really, I would say, belatedly keeping with a national trend.”

Both locally and nationally, prison populations have fallen since the COVID-19 pandemic saw many non-violent offenders released over health concerns. And the lower incarceration numbers have stuck. That’s led states like Illinois and New York to close prisons in the last few years.

In Pennsylvania, the state’s 23 prisons collectively hovered around 100% capacity before the pandemic, with some individual facilities overfilled. But the latest state Department of Corrections monthly population report paints a different picture, with facilities operating at just over 82% capacity. According to the Department of Corrections, there are more than 37,000 people in the state’s 23 prisons and one boot camp on any given day, and monthly reports show that number is often higher by thousands.

Jill McCorkel, a professor of criminology and sociology at Villanova University, said this is in part because of releases during the COVID-19 pandemic, but also because of a bipartisan trend of support for legislation rolling back war-on-drugs era policies that started to stem incarceration rates in the late 2000s and 2010s.

At the time, America’s prison population was growing explosively, and increasingly costing taxpayers. Ethical and cost concerns brought together lawmakers and advocates on both the left and the right. Groups as disparate as Americans For Prosperity, a political advocacy group funded by The Koch brothers, and the American Civil Liberties Union can often still find common cause pushing laws intended to reduce mandatory sentencing laws around the country that were born out of the crackdown on drug use in the 1980s.

Shubik-Richards said she believes the lower incarceration numbers are here to stay, barring a “large external shock.”

But there are other considerations the Department of Corrections and the governor should take into account, she said. Right now, most Pennsylvania prisons are facing a severe shortage of reintegration-focused programs, whether those are educational, vocational or dealing with mental health and substance abuse issues. Consolidating staff at fewer facilities, Shubik-Richards said, could be one way to improve the situation. But that will depend in part on how many specialized staff can be retained.

And importantly, one of the best predictors of post-incarceration success for inmates is whether or not their families are able to visit them behind bars according to Shubik-Richards and other advocates. Numerous academic studies support a small to moderate reduction in recidivism associated with family visitation. Shubik-Richards wants any decision on which facilities to close to take into account the population centers where detainees are coming from. 

Philadelphia and Allegheny County residents make up the largest share of the state’s prison population.

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ALTERT: Look closely, the 'Big Beautiful Bill' is also an attack on the rule of law

In President Trump’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”--buried in Section 70302 of the legislation— is a provision that would severely restrict federal courts’ authority to hold government officials in contempt if they violate judicial orders, reports the Campaign Legal Center.

A court’s ability to hold bad actors in contempt is a vital enforcement power that judges can use to compel compliance with their rulings.

When somebody chooses to violate a court order, the judge who issued the ruling has a few different options to force them to comply, including holding them in contempt and issuing sanctions, fines, or even jail time until the order is followed.

But the reconciliation bill would require anyone suing the government to pay a bond before the court can use its contempt power to enforce injunctions or restraining orders meant to halt illegal actions.

By restricting this authority, the House bill threatens the power of the judicial branch. On its own, that represents an attack on the rule of law and the separation of powers that underlies our democracy. But in the context of our current political moment, a more specific goal is unfortunately clear. 

Courts have already ruled at least 170 times against the Trump administration, including a preliminary injunction sought by CLC that halted Trump’s unconstitutional attempt to change the rules for federal elections. In response to many of these rulings, the president has resisted compliance and waged intimidation campaigns targeting the judges responsible.

In light of all this, the House bill seems squarely and unacceptably focused on shielding the Trump administration from accountability when it breaks the law. 

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Wyoming Governor considering moratorium on death penalty to save money

Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon told lawmakers he was considering a moratorium on death penalty as a way to save money ahead of a wave of budget cuts in response to declining state revenue, reported the Casper Star Tribune.

The announcement, which came in a meeting with members of the Legislature’s Joint Appropriations Committee, would temporarily bring an end to the little-used practice of capital punishment in Wyoming.

“I’m looking very seriously at a moratorium on the death penalty,” Gordon said. “Whatever I can do to forestall that is an option. It costs us around a million dollars every time that is brought up. These are just luxuries — luxuries, that we will no longer be able to afford.”

While the Wyoming Legislature has so far been reluctant to eliminate the death penalty, Gordon said that the state’s looming fiscal crisis makes maintaining the death penalty an untenable option as he seeks to implement budget cuts of up to 20 percent across the board.

The state is facing a $1.5 billion revenue hole due to the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, as well as downturns in the energy industry.

Wyoming currently has no prisoners on death row. Some lawmakers have pushed to end the death penalty, arguing that maintaining a capital punishment system that’s rarely used is costly and unnecessary. Annually, more than $1 million is set aside to train public attorneys for the possibility of dealing with death penalty cases that rarely come across their desks — a selling point fiscal conservatives have used to try and convince their Republican colleagues to eliminate the practice in Wyoming.

“No government program in Wyoming is a bigger waste than the death penalty,” Cheyenne Republican Rep. Jared Olsen, who has been spearheading the effort to repeal the death penalty in Wyoming, wrote in an op-ed in the Star-Tribune over the weekend. “It should be the first to go.”

Gordon’s announcement was quickly praised Monday by a number of groups that have worked to oppose the death penalty over the past year, including the national organization Conservatives Concerned About The Death Penalty, which began a repeal campaign in Wyoming early last year after an effort to repeal the practice fell short in the Wyoming Senate.

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Defunding police departments?

Taken literally, calls to defund police departments conjure images of empty precinct stations and the proliferation of citizen patrols, reported NBC News. But if the ideas behind the movement take hold, their implementation may look less like the Minneapolis City Council’s vote to disband its police department and instead resemble more moderate experiments already underway in cities and towns around the country. That includes projects like RIGHT Care that don’t reject police or seek to take away their entire budget but rather aim to decrease their role in situations that are not dangerous, while allowing medical and social services workers to take the lead.

“There is no magic switch to turn off and boom there’s no police department,” said Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College, whose 2017 book “The End of Policing” has become a manifesto for protesters and police-reform advocates.

“People are trying to figure out what kind of society would be possible that doesn’t rely on police and prisons to solve its problems, and that’s a long-term political vision that is important to this movement. But if you look at what people are doing on the ground, it’s taking money for gang enforcement and spending it on after-school programs and youth counselors. It’s about going to budget hearings and lobbying city council members and holding town hall meetings in neighborhood centers.”

Driving this effort is a realization that police use of deadly force against black people has not abated in the six years since a string of killings of black men by police ignited a national call for more police training and accountability.

Instead of trying to change things from within — a process that funneled more resources to police departments — the defund movement calls for reducing communities’ reliance on police for a number of services: monitoring the homeless, resolving domestic quarrels, disciplining students, responding to outbursts by people with mental illness, swarming neighborhoods to tamp down violence and responding to minor complaints like someone trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill, the accusation that triggered the police call that ended in Floyd’s death.

That work, advocates say, could be better done by outreach workers, social workers and community workers trained to de-escalate street feuds. That could be paid for by diverting money from police budgets to municipal programs that deal with underlying causes of crime, including poverty, inadequate housing and poor education.

“When we talk about defunding the police, what we're saying is invest in the resources that our communities need,” Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza told NBC News’ “Meet the Press.” “So much of policing right now is generated and directed towards quality-of-life issues, homelessness, drug addiction, domestic violence. … But what we do need is increased funding for housing, we need increased funding for education, we need increased funding for quality of life of communities who are over-policed and over-surveilled.”

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Over last 40 years the cost of policing has tripled

Over the past four decades, the cost of policing in the U.S. has almost tripled, from $42.3 billion in 1977 to $114.5 billion in 2017, according to an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data conducted by the Urban Institute on behalf of Bloomberg Businessweek.

Despite the rising dollar amounts, policing has consistently made up about 3.7% of state and local budgets since the 1970s. However, crime has been trending downward for years: Violent crime and property crime have fallen significantly since the early 1990s, according to U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics data.

The disconnect between police funding and crime rates is a sign of the need to reform the system, advocates say. “It doesn’t make sense that the NYPD budget increases year over year,” says Jennvine Wong, staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society’s Cop Accountability Project in New York City.

In a Yahoo News/YouGov poll conducted on May 29 and 30, as protests over George Floyd’s death were spreading, the vast majority of respondents supported police reforms such as de-escalation training. But 65% said they oppose reducing police budgets.

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GateHouse: Local jails big part of America’s incarceration problem

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

June 2, 2017

Local jails are driving the steady flow of incarcerated people in this country. Much is made of non-violent offenders serving long sentences in federal prison, or how mandatory minimum sentences are clogging America’s prisons. The fact is, one-third of all inmates are held in local jails.

The difference between a jail and a prison is simple. Jails are run by local government bodies for short-sentences, often the result of minor offenses, and pre-trial detention. Prisons are for long sentences, for serious crimes and operated by states or the federal government.

According to a new study released by the Prison Policy Institute, the 11 million people who go to jail each year are there for brief, but life-altering, periods of time. Most are released in days, or hours, after their arrest, but others are held for months or more. Only one in three people in jails have been convicted.

I have used this column to lament the ridiculousness of detaining people who cannot afford minimal bail. Those people sit in jail for months only to have the charges dismissed or are released for time served -- often after serving much longer sentences than would have been meted out if a plea agreement had been negotiated sooner.

Beyond bail there are an increasing number of jails that run a side-business of renting jail cells to other government agencies. The jail is looked at in some communities as a money maker. For one, it employs local residents and that employment helps churn residual businesses in the community. In addition, county officials charge a fee for out-of-county or out-of-state inmates and even immigration detainees.

That money is used to balance local budgets. In more than half of U.S. states, about 10 percent of the people in jail are not “traditional jail inmates.” They are people being held under contract for federal or state agencies. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the systematic renting of jail cells to other jurisdictions has changed the priorities and the policies of jail officials. If the county is making money, an overcrowded jail is not a bad thing.

In Pennsylvania, state prisoners who violate their parole are not immediately returned to state prison. Due to some creative legislation, parole violators are housed in county jails for up to 6 months and then returned to the community. The state pays the county to house the parole violators and in turn the state can boast that they have less men and women in state prisons. Mind you, not less prisoners, but less prisoners in state facilities.

The problem goes beyond Pennsylvania. States like Alabama, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Tennessee and Utah are in the business of renting space to federal authorities.

Louisiana has mastered the “for profit public prison.” According to the Prison Policy Institute, Louisiana has largely outsourced the construction and operation of state prisons to individual parishes. Fifty-two percent of the state’s prison population is housed under contract with local jails; and as a result two out of three people held in Louisiana jails are not “traditional jail inmates.”

The federal government is gobbling up local jail cells as well. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the U.S. Marshals Service rents about 26,200 cells each year, mostly to hold federal pre-trial detainees in locations where there is no federal detention center. Immigration and Customs Enforcement also rents about 15,700 cells each year for people facing deportation.

If filling local jails becomes a cash cow for local municipalities, the future is predictable and terrifying. Local government officials have a financial incentive to fill their jails -- regardless of the toll on communities, families and individuals.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010” was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter at @MatthewTMangino.

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Should small PA communities pay the state for police protection?

Should state taxpayers be footing the bill for police services to Pennsylvania's small unprotected communities, asks PennLive.com?

That's a question being asked after the governor floated a new plan to help close the budget deficit and fund new hires of state police amid a statewide budget crunch and expected trooper shortage.

Specifically, Gov. Tom Wolf has proposed a new fee on municipalities relying on state police coverage the most - an unwelcome change for some, especially the communities that would need to pay $25 per resident.

Nearly half of Pennsylvania's 2,500 municipalities rely solely on state police protection. Critics of the arrangement say some of these communities are able to afford their own police forces and have instead taken advantage of an outdated system. As a result, they argue, taxpayers statewide have been forced to subsidize those services -- often while also paying to fund their own local departments. 

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Pennsylvania in the throes of a heroin crisis

If officials are tuned in to the statewide heroin crisis that has killed thousands of Pennsylvanians, they apparently think it’s a cheap fix, reported PublicSource.
Pennsylvania ranks third nationally in heroin addiction, with an estimated 40,000 users, according to the state attorney general’s office.
Meanwhile, treatment facilities run out of money, addicts are turned away from long-term care and billions of dollars are spent in the state to deal with the collateral costs of addiction, but not to treat it.
After six years of inaction, in 2010 the Pennsylvania General Assembly created the Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs, formerly a modest bureau tucked into the Department of Health.
Then they piled on a huge workload and gave it little money.
Overdoses have spiked in Pennsylvania, with heroin and other opiates killing more than 3,000 people since 2009.
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Arizona cuts education and proposes new prison

Arizona's new Republican governor Doug Ducey said during his inaugural address  "Fair warning: The budget will not meet with general approval among special interests." he said. "I can assure you that a more efficient government is not only necessary, but sensible." But there was one special interest group that must have been pleased when Ducey rolled out his budget proposal: the private prison industry, reported Mother Jones.
Ducey's austere budget plan slashed $384 million in state programs, including $75 million in funding for Arizona's public universities. But it earmarked $5 million for a new, 3,000-bed private prison that even the state's most notorious law enforcement official, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, argues is unnecessary.
While Ducey makes the case to spend money on a new prison, Arizona universities are fighting off deepening budget cuts. The proposed $75 million cut represents 10 percent of the total budget for Arizona's three major public universities, a threshold that school regents said they'd accept. Concern has mounted, however, that more than $90 million could be cut. From 2009 to 2012, Arizona universities saw $400 million in cuts, which the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities called the largest education cuts in the country. Since then, tuition has doubled and enrollment has increased.
Critics of Ducey's prison plan have argued that funding a private prison is not a one-time expense.
The state would be locked in for $100 million in operating costs over three years, and as much as $1.5 billion over the next two decades, according to the Grand Canyon Institute, an Arizona think tank. Beyond that, depending on contract specifics, Arizona is required to keep private facilities at 90 to 100 percent occupancy—a burden that several experts believe could thwart Arizona's emerging criminal-justice-reform movement, which is targeting harsh sentencing laws, among other things, that add to the state's high incarceration rate.
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Justice Reinvestment Working for North Carolina

Three and a half years ago North Carolina passed wide-ranging legislation designed to address the state's soaring prison population and budget, high recidivism rates and thin behavioral treatment programs for offenders.

According to a new report from a nonprofit group that helped lawmakers facilitate the law's creation, the "Justice Reinvestment Act" is exceeding expectations laid out in 2011, reported the Associated Press.

The Council of State Governments Justice Center told a General Assembly oversight committee on criminal justice matters that the state prison population has declined by 3,400 offenders within three years to under 38,000 inmates, or hundreds below projected levels expected under the law by mid-2017. Ten prisons also have closed, contrasting with a prison building spree in the early 2000s.

Overall, the state is on track to save or avoid $560 million in spending on prisons and other government services by mid-2017 because of the reforms, the report said.

"The way North Carolina did it is truly unique and something to be proud of," said Marshall Clement, the center's director of state initiatives, told the panel last week to provide a three-year update. "You've beaten those projections."
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Prison spending outpacing education spending nationwide

A report released this week by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that the growth of state spending on prisons in recent years has far outpaced the growth of spending on education, reported the Huffington Post.
Adjusting for inflation, state general fund spending on prison-related expenses increased over 140 percent between 1986 and 2013. During the same period, state spending on K-12 education increased only 69 percent, while higher education saw an increase of less than six percent.
State spending on corrections has exploded in recent years, as incarceration rates have more than tripled in a majority of states in the past few decades. The report says that the likelihood that an offender will be incarcerated has gone up across the board for all major crimes. At the same time, increases in education spending have not kept pace. In fact, since 2008, spending on education has actually declined in a majority of states in the wake of the Great Recession.
According to the report, rates of violent crime and property crime have actually fallen over the years, even while incarceration rates have risen. Therefore, it appears that states' more aggressive incarceration policies are behind the higher prison rates.
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Police departments are stuggling to keep pace with expenditures

Public expenditures on policing have more than quadrupled between 1982 and 2006, reported Governing Magazine. But with city budget shortfalls opening up across the country, police departments and their chiefs, once used to ever-growing budgets, were now facing a new reality of cutbacks, layoffs and even outright mergers and consolidations of entire police departments with others.
With federal subsidies disappearing (federal support for criminal justice assistance grant programs shrank by 43 percent between 2011 and 2013), thanks to a frugal Congress, police had few options.
As always, funding continues to be an issue. In May, the major law enforcement agencies sent a letter to the House and Senate Homeland Security Committee asking that the National Preparedness Grant Program reconsider a series of proposed changes that would reduce funding for terrorism prevention. A 2013 survey by the Institute of Justice found that 78 percent of law enforcement agencies had their grant funding cut since 2010 and 43 percent reported cuts of between 11 and 25 percent.
New technologies might ease some of the financial burdens in the long run, but take an initial investment.  Police department should proceed with cause and be prudent in there technology choices.
New technologies must be benchmarked, with metrics that forecast just what their impact will be on operations before they are fully implemented. Second, police departments need to set policies, especially around tools that gather data about individuals, such as video, to ensure that the civil liberties and privacy of law-abiding citizens is not compromised.
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California voters to address prison overcrowding

California’s justice system has been dealing with a prison-overcrowding crisis that has embroiled it in a long court fight, reported FoxNews.
Voters this fall, however, could approve big -- and some say "dangerous" -- changes to the state’s sentencing system, aimed in part at easing the overcrowding. On the state ballot is a proposal that would dramatically change how the state treats certain “nonserious, nonviolent” drug and property crimes, by downgrading them from felonies to misdemeanors.
The measure, known as Prop 47, also would allow those currently serving time for such offenses to apply for a reduced sentence, as long as they have no prior convictions for more serious crimes like murder, attempted murder or sexual offenses.
The proposition would reduce penalties for an array of crimes that can be prosecuted as either felonies or misdemeanors in California. This includes everything from drug possession to check fraud to petty theft to forgery. Prop 47 would, generally, treat all these as misdemeanors, in turn reducing average jail sentences. According to a state estimate, there are approximately 40,000 people convicted each year in California who would be affected by the measure.
“[Prop 47] allows the criminal justice system to focus in on more serious crimes,” Hughes said.
According to an analysis by the California Budget Project, state and local governments would save hundreds of millions of dollars every year. The measure dictates the savings be split among three different areas, with 65 percent going to mental health and drug treatment programs, 25 percent going to K-12 school programs and 10 percent going to victim services.
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Supervised bail program flourishes in Pennsylvania county

In response to increased usage of Bradford County, Pennsylvania's supervised bail program, the program is being expanded, which will almost double the number of individuals who can enroll in the program, reported The Daily Review.
The program was launched in September 2013 to reduce the overcrowding at the Bradford County jail.
The Bradford County commissioners voted to create a third, full-time bail release officer position for the supervised bail program, which is a program aimed at increasing the number of defendants who are out on bail.
The additional officer will increase the number of defendants and others who can be enrolled in the program to approximately 75, Bradford County jail Warden Donald Stewart said.
Until now, the capacity of the program has stood at about 40 individuals, Stewart has said.
At Thursday's meeting of the Bradford County Prison Board, Stewart said that there were 53 defendants and others currently enrolled in the supervised bail program.
The number of individuals enrolled in the program had reached an all-time high of 57 at some point within the previous two weeks, he said.
Enrollment in the program was allowed to increase beyond the 40-person capacity because the two bail release officers felt they could handle the additional individuals, the warden said.
In an interview, Stewart said that enrollment in the supervised bail program has been growing because, over time, the county's four magisterial district judges have been using the program more, and because Bradford County Court Judge Maureen Beirne also began using the program not long after it was launched.
The supervised bail program "is a very successful program" which has saved the county money, Bradford County Commissioner Daryl Miller said.
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California's prison realignment not making the grade

Nearly 15 months after starting the "boldest move in criminal justice in decades," California Gov. Jerry Brown declared victory over a prison crisis that had appalled federal judges and stumped governors for two decades. Diverting thousands of criminals from state prisons into county jails and probation departments not only had eased crowding, he said, but also reduced costs, increased safety and improved rehabilitation. "The prison emergency is over in California," Brown said last year, reported the Los Angeles Times.
The prison population fell sharply at first, dropping from 162,400 to 133,000, but it is rising again. There now are 135,400 inmates in state custody, a number expected to grow to 147,000 in 2019.
The state Finance Department originally projected that realignment would reduce prison spending by $1.4 billion this fiscal year and that about two-thirds of that savings would be passed on to counties to cover the costs of their new charges.
Instead, the state's increased costs for private prison space and the compensation it pays out for county jails, prosecutors and probation departments adds up to about $2 billion a year more for corrections than when Brown regained office.
Without stemming the flow of prisoners into the system, the problems created by crowding continue. The Little Hoover Commission, an independent state agency that investigates government operations, said in a May report that realignment simply "changed the place where the sentence is served."Many jails are now overcrowded, and tens of thousands of criminals have been freed to make room for more. Brown insists his plan is working, although he has conceded that change can be slow. "It is not going to create miracles overnight," he said this spring. The governor's office has embraced the idea that much of the incarceration, probation and rehabilitation cycle should take place on the local level, instead of being left to the state. Putting prisoners back in local hands "is encouraging and stimulating creative alternatives," he said.
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Pennsylvania DOC hiring freeze raises safety concerns

The money-saving hiring freeze placed on Pennsylvania state prisons amid budget pressure has raised concerns about safety in the institutions, reported the Citizen Voice.

Roy Pinto, president of the Pennsylvania State Corrections Officers Association, told the Associated Press that prison staffing is at the 2008 level, while the state prison population has grown by 5,000 more inmates since then. He said officers’ biggest concern is their own safety and a hiring freeze that lasts well past July 1 — the soonest Secretary of Corrections John Wetzel projected it to end when he imposed the freeze May 27 — will increase the danger.

Susan Bensinger, deputy press secretary for Pennsylvania DOC, said the freeze is across the board, not just for hiring correctional officers.

“We feel that freeze is going to be a short-term, temporary freeze,” she said.

As of April, more than 50,000 inmates were in state prisons. The state prison system has 9,483 security staff employment positions, but prison officials were unable to provide the total number of vacant security staff positions. Of the approximately 16,000 total employees, there are 422 vacant positions.

Bensinger said that number of vacant positions “is not out of line with where we normally are.”

The DOC freezes lasted no longer than six months, according to Bensinger; state freezes have lasted up to a year. She said there’s no safety concerns among administrative members regarding the vacant positions because if there are “critical positions” that need to be immediately filled, staff can apply for an exception.

“Wetzel started out as correctional officer,” Bensinger said. “He would not compromise the safety of staff and public to save a dollar.”

Bensinger said the DOC initiates freezes to make determinations about filling positions and managing the budget. It’s a temporary stop in hiring so the administration can review all open positions to determine what will need to be filled and what can wait without compromising safety and security, adding it also provides some temporary savings.

The state’s finances are under extreme pressure, according to the AP. Tax collections for the 2013-14 fiscal year ending June 30 are about $600 million behind expectations, putting Republican Gov. Tom Corbett’s $29.4 billion budget proposal out of balance by more than $1 billion.

“With a need for supplemental appropriations this year and the budget uncertainties looming next year, the implementation of a freeze at this time is prudent fiscal measure,” Bensinger said.

Each month, she said, there are about 100 turnovers in the statewide prison system, and hiring state employees is always a process — no matter the agency — given civil service tests, application reviews, physicals and mental health evaluations.

A class of 42 trainees graduated Friday to become correctional officers. Despite the freeze, Bensinger said, those individuals will be granted one year of conditional employment.

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The Cautionary Instruction: Lawmakers more ambitious with government reduction bill

Matthew T. Mangino
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/Ipso Facto
June 6, 2014
Pennsylvania has one of the largest and most expensive legislatures in the country. The General Assembly’s annual budget exceeds a quarter of a billion dollars. Those dollars go to pay the salary of 253 legislators and about 2,600 staffers.
New Hampshire has the largest legislature in the country with 424 members, but they are part-timers who make about $100 a year, compared with the $84,000 base salary for Pennsylvania lawmakers.
Proposals to reduce the size of the legislature come up in nearly every legislative session. In 2011, there was a proposal to reduce the House from 203 members to 121 and the Senate from 50 to 30 members.
However, this year some senators were not satisfied with just reducing the number of lawmakers.
“There’s also two other branches of government that need to be reduced also, in my opinion,” said Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati.

This week, a Senate committee passed resolutions to eliminate 55 legislative seats and several appellate judgeships. Even the executive branch of government was not exempt. The proposed legislation would eliminate the position of Lt. Governor. Proposed constitutional amendments to shrink the size of government across the three branches have been sent to the full Senate for consideration.
Scarnati’s plan would reduce the state Supreme Court from seven to five seats and cap the Superior Court at 11 members. Without a Lt. Governor, Scarnati’s plan provides for a special election to replace a governor who leaves office, with the Senate President Pro Tempore filling in.
Scarnati currently holds that position in the senate and filled the Lt. Governor’s office after Lt. Governor Catherine Baker Knoll died in 2008.
Pennsylvania attorneys and political observers expressed shock and disapproval over Senate bills. “I think it caught a lot of us by surprise that the judiciary was included in that mix,” John J. Hare, chair of the appellate advocacy and post-trial practice group at Marshall Dennehey Warner Coleman & Goggin in Philadelphia told The Legal Intelligencer. “I had no idea that they were going to bring the judiciary into this and I think [cutting judgeships] would be really unfortunate.”
Both reduction measures passed unanimously out of committee -- one bill addressed the House, the other addressed the Senate, judiciary, and lieutenant governor.
Senators said their concerns could be debated without slowing down the lengthy process ahead. A constitutional amendment must first pass the General Assembly in two consecutive legislative sessions, and then clear a voter referendum.
Not everyone is enamored with idea of reducing the size of the legislature. Opponents say the dangers include moving access to state lawmakers farther away from constituents, diluting the representation of rural areas, and the overstated cost savings projections.

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Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George, P.C. He is the former district attorney of Lawrence County and just completed a six year term on the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole. His weekly column on crime and punishment is syndicated by GateHouse New Service. You can read his musings on the criminal justice system at www.mattmangino.com and follow Matt on Twitter @MatthewTMangino. His new book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010: The Crimes, Arrests, Trials, Appeals, Last Meals, Final Words and Executions of 46 Persons in the United States is now available from McFarland & Company publishers.
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The Cautionary Instruction: Public defenders and prosecutors underpaid

Matthew T. Mangino
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette/Ipso Facto
May 16, 2014
The Massachusetts Bar Association, Commission on Criminal Justice Attorney Compensation found that Massachusetts ranks dead last in annual salaries paid to public defenders and that the county prosecutor is often the lowest-paid person in the courtroom, finishing behind custodial workers.
Martin W. Healy, chief legal counsel for the bar association told the Boston Globe “There is definitely a public safety aspect to all of it… [t]ax dollars are not being spent in a wise and appropriate fashion.”
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1963 landmark decision, Gideon v. Wainwright, required states to provide lawyers for defendants, regardless of their ability to pay—a ruling that transformed the nation’s legal landscape. More than fifty years later, defender resources remain scarce and prosecutors have not fared much better.
Last year, after furloughing of 22 lawyers, a Detroit prosecutor said her office was stretched too thin to cover all traffic court and domestic violence cases.

Abe Krash, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who helped represented Gideon has pointed out, “In public defender offices, there are many extremely conscientious attorneys, but they are tremendously underfunded and overburdened.”
A 2011 report by the Justice Policy Institute found that most of the country’s public defender offices lacked enough attorneys to meet nationally established caseload guidelines. Also, the report found that most defender offices did not have sufficient support staff, such as investigators and paralegals.
“When defenders do not have access to sufficient resources, they may be unable to interview key witnesses, collect or test physical evidence, or generally prepare and provide quality defense for their client, resulting in poorer outcomes for the client,” the report concluded.
An exhaustive new analysis of defender workloads in Missouri, sponsored by the American Bar Association, described by legal experts as the most detailed and credible of its kind, has provided numbers to back up the claim that defenders face overwhelming workloads.
For the study, carried out in 2013 by an accounting firm, the 375 lawyers in the Missouri State Public Defender System recorded how they spent their time in five-minute increments.
Independently, a panel of private and public lawyers estimated the average time a defense lawyer in Missouri needed to properly argue cases of varying severity, including duties such as consulting with the defendant, investigating evidence, conducting depositions and researching legal options, as well as their time in court.
“We found we are worse off than we thought we were,” Cathy R. Kelly, director of the state public defender system told the New York Times.
The panel found, on average, that 47 hours were needed to prepare for serious felonies. Missouri defenders spent about nine hours preparing those cases. For misdemeanors, defenders needed 12 hours. However, they spent only about two hours per case.

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Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George, P.C. He is the former district attorney of Lawrence County and just completed a six year term on the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole. His weekly column on crime and punishment is syndicated by GateHouse New Service. You can read his musings on the criminal justice system at www.mattmangino.com and follow Matt on Twitter @MatthewTMangino. His new book The Executioner’s Toll, 2010: The Crimes, Arrests, Trials, Appeals, Last Meals, Final Words and Executions of 46 Persons in the United States is now available from McFarland & Company publishers.
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Ohio's prison population continues to climb,budget at $3.14 billion

In 1974, there were 8,516 inmates in Ohio state prisons. Forty years later, the system is nearly six times as large, packed with 50,639 offenders, according to the Columbus Dispatch.
One of every 175 adult Ohioans is housed, fed and receives medical care at taxpayer expense in a state prison. The latest two-year budget allocated $3.14 billion for the prison system.
The latest projections suggest the inmate population in 27 prisons (including two private facilities) will hit 52,000 in two years, and 53,484 in five. Prisons already are bulging with 30 percent more prisoners than they were designed to hold.
Here’s the math behind the numbers: Each prisoner costs Ohio taxpayers $22,836 per year, so adding 100 prisoners, for example, costs nearly $2.3 million.
A report by the Correctional Institution Inspection Committee, a legislative corrections watchdog, last August listed five contributing reasons why the prison population has gone up: a very small increase in violent crime, longer sentences for higher-level felonies, dramatically fewer prison releases (a 24.3 percent drop in five years), legislation increasing penalties for specific crimes, and adverse court decisions.
Another factor may trump all the others: a flood of heroin cases. Men coming into prison still outnumber women more than 4 to 1, but that gap is shrinking as more women are incarcerated for nonviolent drug crimes.
The inmate-to-guard ratio, now about 7.4-to-1, has risen because of the increase in the prison population, coupled with decreases in the number of front-line officers. Serious violent assaults on officers rose to a seven-year high as a result of overcrowding and the staffing shortage.
Ohio is not alone in having so many of its citizens locked up. The National Research Council issued a report last week saying incarceration in state and federal prisons rose from 200,000 in 1973 to 1.5 million in 2009. There are 2.2 million adults in U.S. prisons and jails — about 1 in 100 adults — more than in any other country. The U.S. has roughly 25 percent of the world’s inmates, but just 5 percent of the population.
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GateHouse: Scrapping college classes for inmates shortsighted

Matthew T. Mangino
GateHouse News Service
May 9, 2014
In February, New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced a new statewide initiative to give prison inmates the opportunity to earn a college degree through funding college classes in prisons across the state.

In a press release the governor’s office revealed that New York currently spends $60,000 per year to incarcerate each inmate, and approximately $3.6 billion each year in total prison costs. New York’s current recidivism rate is about 40 percent. With a paltry investment of $5,000 per inmate to provide one year of college education, New York could cut into the recidivism rate and reduce costs.

Cuomo told National Public Radio that providing taxpayer-funded college classes in New York’s prisons is a common-sense plan that will reduce the number of inmates who commit new crimes. “Forget nice; let’s talk about self-interest,” Cuomo suggested.

Great idea, right? Not so fast.

In 1971, there was a deadly riot at Attica Prison in New York. Forty-three people died. During the riot inmates made numerous demands, one of which was for better educational programs. As a result, college education programs were soon available to inmates across the country through federal Pell Grants.

Then crime rates began to soar. In 1990, the homicide rate was nearly eight times what it is today in New York City and everyone wanted to get tough on crime.

By 1994, President Bill Clinton pushed through a tough crime bill that dramatically increased penalties for offenders and eliminated all federally financed college education for prison inmates. Pell Grants for federal and state prisons inmates were abolished.

“There must be no doubt about whose side we’re on,” Clinton said at the time. “People who commit crimes should be caught, convicted and punished. This bill puts government on the side of those who abide by the law, not those who break it.”

According to NPR, Clinton’s act was a victory for the tough-on-crime movement, but many prison experts now say dismantling inmate education programs was misguided.

Critics pointed out that education greatly reduces recidivism; only one-tenth of 1 percent of the Pell Grant budget went to the education of prisoners. New York Times Magazine reported that Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican, argued it was unfair for felons to benefit from Pell Grants when as many as 100,000 low-income students were denied them each year. She asked, “Why should prisoners be educated for nothing when so many honest folks failed to get a break?”

At the state capitol, lawmakers were outraged at Cuomo’s plan. Who cares if the plan could reduce crime and save taxpayers’ money. Some legislators started petitions to collect signatures from constituents who opposed the idea, including one with the title “Hell No to Attica University,” reported the New York Times.

The idea didn’t sit well with Washington politicians either. According to the Times, three Republican congressmen from the New York delegation introduced what they called the “Kids Before Cons Act,” which would prevent federal money from being used to pay for college classes for federal or state inmates.

The strenuous opposition continued even in the face of valid research that indicated receiving correctional education while incarcerated reduces recidivism rates. The Rand Corporation analyzed prison education programs and found that, on average, inmates who participated in correctional education programs were 43 percent less likely to recidivate than inmates who did not.

In the face of growing opposition, Cuomo withdrew the plan. Cutting recidivism rates nearly in half would mean fewer victims, fewer inmates in prison and a reduction in prison costs. Lawmakers turned their backs on this opportunity because it gives inmates an advantage over “honest folks.” But honest folks deserve better than shortsighted political pandering.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010” was recently released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter at @MatthewTMangino.
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