MI Governor’s Sentence Reduction Plan Fails
Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s proposal to cut prison sentences for well-behaved inmates failed its first test in the Legislature on Tuesday.
The plan to restore so-called good time credits for prisoners was left out of a 2010-11 budget adopted by a Senate subcommittee, along with $130 million in savings the administration forecast from closing four or five prisons.
The Senate alternative assumed savings instead from canceling a scheduled 3% raise for state employees and ordering the Michigan Department of Corrections to implement other cost-cutting. But the prison budget adopted by the subcommittee still came in at nearly $2 billion — $32 million higher than Granholm’s original proposal.
Subcommittee Chairman Alan Cropsey, R-Dewitt, said the wholesale release of prisoners — MDOC officials estimated that about 5,000 inmates could be released by the end of the year if good time credits were reinstated — “doesn’t make sense at all.”
“The governor gave us a budget based on a policy that is not going to happen,” he said.
Administration officials countered that the proposed Senate spending plan, which assumes legislative action to revoke the employee pay raise, is no less fanciful. An effort to do so in the Senate fell short two weeks ago. The deadline for both the House and Senate to reject the raise is April 11.
But Cropsey said the Granholm administration’s efforts to control prison spending have endangered the public and shifted the financial burden to local police departments and jails.
Further, the Department of Corrections has been far less successful cutting costs than it has at cutting the number of inmates, he said. The state’s cost per prisoner has climbed 17% in the last two years, he said.
MDOC officials said much of the increase is attributable to factors outside the department’s control.
The department budget is scheduled to be voted on by the full Senate Appropriations Committee as early as today. Separate legislation to reinstate good time remains stalled in the House.
Granholm’s good time proposal follows two years in which MDOC has accelerated the release of thousands of inmates to parole.
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