For the third year in a row, the county council is supporting legislation that would prohibit judges from sentencing criminals to the Montgomery County Correctional Facility for more than 12 months, said Councilman Phil Andrews (D-Dist. 3). Report by Gazette.net.

Before fiscal 2010, the state reimbursed counties for all inmates held longer than 90 days. That year, the state cut its reimbursement rate to the county by roughly two-thirds, to $45 per day for each inmate held between 12 and 18 months. The state cut all reimbursement payments for those held less than a year.

Statewide, county jail systems have lost more than $25 million since the new reimbursement formula was implemented. Montgomery County lost $3.4 million in fiscal 2010 alone, said Arthur M. Wallenstein, director of the Montgomery County Department of Correction and Rehabilitation.

“The bottom line is, the state’s decision not to reimburse the county for holding prisoners who stay longer than 12 months in our jails, costs the county a little over $3 million a year and this is the third year of that,” Andrews said.

The state’s old reimbursement formula paid county facilities based on the actual operating costs of each jail. In Montgomery County, the daily rate had been $141.18 for every inmate, according to Wallenstein. Because the reduced reimbursement rate also applied to fewer individuals, the cut was more painful, Wallenstein said.

The Montgomery County Correctional Facility in Boyds can hold as many as 1,208 inmates. Last week, there were 963 inmates, and at least 25 of them were expected to serve between 12 and 18 months, Wallenstein said.

State law gives Maryland judges the option of sending criminals with sentences between 12 and 18 months to either local or state facilities.

The county’s fiscal 2012 budget for corrections and rehabilitation is $64.26 million, with less than $500,000 projected to come from the state, said Craig Dowd, budget and procurement manager for the department.

Andrews said the cuts endanger the county’s jail rehabilitation programs, which include treatment for substance abuse and mental health issues, cognitive behavioral modification, basic education, life skills and workforce preparation.

“Without state funding, it creates considerable pressures on the system,” Andrews said. “It makes it harder for the jail to run any of their programs.”

A state law states that starting July 1, 2012, a defendant sentenced to one year or less in the Arizona Department of Corrections will serve that time in the county jail. The exception is if the county has an agreement with the state prison system to reimburse the state for incarcerating a prisoner in the state prison. That could be at least $55 a day per inmate, Deputy County Manager Dana Hlavac said. Report by Tri-State Online.

The second part of the law states that the county will pay the state for any prisoner serving in the state prison after July 1, 2012, who has one year or less left on the sentence.

Mohave County sends about 70 inmates a year to the state prison for sentences of one year or less. The average sentence is about nine months or 270 days. That is equal to about 18,900 inmate days or the county paying the state an additional $1,039,500 a year.

Conservative estimates that the cost to Mohave County would be about $500,000 for inmates serving one year or less projected to still be in prison by July 1, 2012, and $1 million to send future inmates to prison after that date. The first year cost could be at least $1.5 million for those short term DOC inmates and $1 million for each succeeding year, Hlavac said.

If those inmates are kept in county jail, that would require additional jail staffing, which would drive up overall costs to the county. That does not take into account inmates with special needs such as mental health issues, chronic diseases or pregnancy needs. That also does not take into account inmates who pose a security threat such as criminal street gang members, Hlavac said.

Other overall costs would include medical costs, food, religious or prisoner rights or federal lawsuits filed by inmates. Mandatory costs could include sex offender treatment or drug or alcohol abuse treatment.

The county jail does not have to provide sex offender or substance abuse treatment because jail inmates are presumed innocent until they are found guilty. The jail is a short-term facility until an inmate is sentenced. The county’s costs to provide programs to DOC inmates at the jail are unknown depending on the inmate and the programs but could be an additional $100,000 to $250,000 a year, Hlavac said.

The county opened the 242,000-square-foot jail in October 2010 located next to the county administration building in Kingman. The three-story jail has space for 688 beds housing more than 700 inmates with room to expand to more than 1,100 beds. The new $72 million county jail is triple the size of the former county jail. The jail’s operating budget was $10.5 million.

The daily jail cost to house a jail inmate for the 2011-12 fiscal year was recently raised to $88.82 a day per prisoner. The previous rate was $79.46 a day per prisoner. There is also a one-time $65 booking fee. There are currently about 485 inmates in custody at the county jail.

From 1984 to 2008, the number of offenders serving life terms quadrupled, from 34,000 to roughly 140,000, according to the most recent count by The Sentencing Project, which advocates alternatives to incarceration. Report by Tucson Citizen.

One of the fastest-growing subgroups are inmates serving life without the possibility of parole. Those numbers have jumped from 12,453 in 1992 to 41,095 in 2008 and represent the most costly inmates to house as the aging inmates require increased medical care.

“The challenge for us is to distinguish between the offenders we are afraid of — those who deserve to be locked up for life — and those who we are just mad at and who can be handled outside of prison,” Texas state Sen. John Whitmire said.

Whitmire, a Houston Democrat, helped lead an effort to divert hundreds of offenders to less expensive treatment programs outside of prison. He said the cost of basic housing for an inmate serving life — calculated at $30,000 per year — can easily top $1 million over the inmate’s lifetime.

In Texas, the second-largest state prison system in the country, with 156,000 inmates, the number of offenders serving life without parole has been increasing since the sentence was adopted by the state Legislature in 2005, from 47 in 2007 to 391 this year. The number of Texas prisoners serving life with the possibility of parole — 8,665 — has increased in four of the past five years.

“If we’re committed to spending a lot of money on lifers without parole, it’s going to have an impact on who comes in the front end of the system,” Whitmire said, adding that prison should “not be the first option” for parole and probation violators.

In California, the country’s largest prison system with 164,000 inmates, the number of prisoners serving life terms has been steadily increasing, even as the state faces a federal court mandate to reduce the prison population by 30,000 by 2013. More than 20% of the state’s inmates are serving life terms or equivalent sentences.

Joseph Cassilly, a past president of the National District Attorneys Association, said there is concern that increasing budget pressures on state governments could drive officials to consider paroles for lifers in an attempt to reduce costs.

“How do you explain that to a victim of a crime or a surviving family member who thought life in prison really meant life in prison?” Cassilly said.

The manned guard tower over looks the entry to Calipatria State Prison.

As the state’s massive prison and parole department begins a historic downsizing to cut costs and comply with court orders, it’s getting a hand from organized labor.

The California Correctional Peace Officers Association and five other unions have signed contract amendments for Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation employees that set aside some job protections, drastically cut employees’ state-paid moving allowances and aim to reduce prison officer overtime costs. Report by The Sacramento Bee.

The state estimates the deals will save about $13 million in this fiscal year, compared with the traditional layoff process.

In exchange, unions hope fewer workers will lose their jobs as the department shifts some of its responsibilities to local government. That process started Oct. 1, aiming to cut the state’s prison and parole costs over several years.

By September, the state’s 63,000-employee prison and parole agency had issued more than 2,100 warning notices, the first wave of several to come.

Although the state and the unions say the agreements are a plus for both sides, some employees are unhappy that they may have to uproot.

CCPOA spokesman JeVaughn Baker said Tuesday that the concessions aren’t “ideal” and acknowledged that some union members are upset at the prospect of moving to remote facilities around the state.

“However, we also understand that CDCR is downsizing,” Baker said, “and it is better for our members to relocate than to be jobless in this struggling economy.”

Ron Yank, who heads Gov. Jerry Brown’s Department of Personnel Administration, said the agreements are a “win-win” for the government and its employees.

“We – the state – will save millions of dollars by moving people from places we don’t need them to places where we’re understaffed,” Yank said Tuesday. “The employees get certainty in uncertain economic times.”

Of the 21 bargaining units that negotiate contracts for state employees, 18 represent workers in prisons and parole offices, from correctional officers and parole officers to cooks and custodians. Bargaining units representing state attorneys, engineers and scientists haven’t yet signed new agreements.

Yank said he expects they will ink deals “soon.”

Benefits vs. jobs

Potentially thousands of jobs are in play. Lawmakers, in response to court orders to reduce the prison population and California’s budget woes, signed off this year on a realignment plan that shifts some state penal and parole responsibilities to local governments.

California houses 144,000 inmates in its 33 adult institutions, but the corrections department estimates it will shed 20,000 of those individuals by next summer and another 14,000 by July 2013.

The department also is shifting its adult parole responsibilities to local governments, making obsolete approximately 900 state parole agent and parole support staff jobs.

“The unions had no choice but to play ball,” said Joshua Page, a University of Minnesota sociology professor who has studied the history of California’s penal system. “It came down to keeping benefits and protections or keeping jobs.”

The new union arrangements vary somewhat by union and job classification, but they share broad contours.

Correctional officers who worked at an overstaffed facility, for example, had until this week to volunteer to move to one of five understaffed prisons, including California State Prison, Sacramento, in Folsom, Pelican Bay State Prison near Crescent City and High Desert State Prison near Susanville.

About 200 CCPOA members had volunteered as of Tuesday, Yank said. They’ll get $3,750 to $7,500 to defray moving costs. The state also will give them one day to three days of time off. Employees who want more time can draw up to 10 days from their own accumulated leave credits.

That’s a huge savings for the state, which can wind up paying an average of $30,000 per employee to assist with moving costs, Yank said. Much of that money usually goes to help with employee housing expenses.

Officers in danger of losing their jobs but who don’t want to move voluntarily can bid to join an “overtime avoidance” pool or become “permanent-intermittent” employees. Those groups will be tapped to fill open shifts that would otherwise be covered by overtime.

Cuts to play out in waves

Once those two groups are in place, the corrections department will post which facilities remain overstaffed and understaffed, and which jobs are open. Officers and other department employees can bid for jobs statewide based on seniority.

It’s a significant change, since CDCR layoffs usually happen on a county-by-county basis. That meant that an employee in, say, Riverside County with seven years of service couldn’t displace an employee with less time on the job doing the same work in another county.

The new arrangement “honors the principle of seniority on a statewide basis,” Yank said, by allowing the longest-serving employees under threat of layoff to bump less-senior colleagues anywhere in California.

Employees who don’t go for any of the first three options could be forced to transfer anyway with a reduced moving allowance while they let the standard layoff process play out, which will take four months.

All the new union agreements allow transferring regular employees to fill positions currently occupied by retirees who have returned to the workforce. The deals also quicken the pace of grievance procedures and arbitration when an employee alleges the state violated the new agreements.

“Our members will have many more opportunities and protections than they would have under any previous layoff process,” said SEIU Local 1000 vice president for bargaining Margarita Maldonado in a message to union members.

The layoffs won’t all happen at once. Corrections officials will monitor the prison population, and as it shrinks, the department will issue more notices that employees need to transfer or risk layoff.

“This will be done in waves,” said Ken Murch, chief negotiator and lobbyist for the California Association of Psychiatric Technicians, which represents 7,000 state workers. “In the end, there may be no alternative but to lay people off.”

Murch said his group agreed to a deal much like CCPOA’s, even though relatively few of the association’s members work for the corrections department.

“The state isn’t really sure what the impact will be right now to our members,” Murch said. “We just wanted to get the documents in place in case they start needing to relocate.”

That was not much of a surprise — the county has known those expenses are rising — but Sheriff Lonny Pulkrabek said it’s another reminder that the current jail is too small.    “The jail is still a huge issue out there that hasn’t been resolved,” he said.

The county spent $900,595 to house inmates elsewhere last year, up from $447,915 in 2006. It spent another $73,813 last year on transportation costs, compared with $48,109 two years before.  The county averaged 135 inmates a day last year, up from 115 in 2006; the Johnson County Jail has 92 beds …

Tax increases, the recent $20 million conservation bond and the recession mean that a new jail is probably a few years from becoming a reality, supervisors Chairman Terrence Neuzil said.  “I think it’s pretty difficult to think that we’re going to be able to solve this issue in the short term,” he said.

In the meantime, the county has implemented jail alternative programs to lessen the stress on the jail and recently began sending all overflow inmates to Marshall County, with Johnson County paying a lower rate than it had been to other counties.

It’s a politically charged proposal, though. Opponents say it would thwart the will of voters who approved Measure 57 to lengthen prison sentences for repeat property and drug crimes and mandate drug and alcohol treatment for certain offenders. However, the idea is gaining some traction at the Capitol as lawmakers and Gov. Ted Kulongoski struggle to find ways to pay for key services at a time of shrinking state revenue and an increasing prison population.

The Oregon Business Association’s Ryan Deckert appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to urge lawmakers to set Measure 57 aside at least for the next two years. That could save $75 million and free up the money for other programs, he said. “If we want to set a floor for education funding, then we have to be willing to take on issues such as Measure 57,” Deckert said …

Lawmakers traditionally have been reluctant to override the decisions of voters, but these are especially tough times in terms of the state budget. The next state revenue forecast, due out on May 15, is expected to show the state facing a shortfall of $4 billion or more.  That’s why the notion of suspending Measure 57 has gotten as far as it has.  Kevin Neely, spokesman for the Oregon District Attorneys Association, said local prosecutors aren’t wild about suspending something adopted by voters just last November. But he said that depending on how it’s written, district attorneys could sign off on the plan that’s aimed at cutting the $1.5 billion prison budget for the coming two years.

The full article contains a lot more detail and background.

More than 80 inmates scheduled for release Friday spent much of the day wondering whether they would get out. The Department of Corrections began releasing them late in the day after Chief Court of Appeals Judge Sara Combs issued her order.  But Combs said her order would be in effect only until the state Supreme Court decides whether to take the case or issues other orders about it …

At issue are changes put in place last year under which felons began getting additional credit toward completing their sentences.  That has allowed thousands to be released from prison or from parole supervision earlier than under previous rules.  The legislature prompted the changes to try to reduce prison costs.  Since late May 2008, the Department of Corrections has released more than 3,100 parolees from supervision and more than 2,400 inmates from prisons and jails under the rules.

But in an order released Thursday, Circuit Judge David A. Tapp said the state had applied the rules illegally because felons got credit to cut their sentences based on periods they were on parole before the new rules took effect.  Tapp, whose circuit is Pulaski, Lincoln and Rockcastle counties, issued an injunction to block any more releases from prison or parole statewide.  LaDonna Thompson, state corrections commissioner, appealed Tapp’s order Friday, resulting in Combs’ two-page order.

NYS Department of Corrections Commissioner Brian Fischer said, “We’re not doing this because we want to; we’re doing this because we’re facing a budget crisis … We have permission to close three camps, and on my authority close seven annexes. And that’s part of the 09-10 budget.”

The closures include Camp Mount McGregor in Saratoga County, Camp Gabriels in Franklin County, and Camp Pharsalia in Chenango County, as well as seven annexes around the state, which Fischer said will save taxpayer money. “The savings is considerable,” he said. “We’re talking maybe $20 million this year, and far more the next year.” Fischer said, “Why I’m phasing this in is the fact I’m losing 80 correction’s officers a month through normal attrition. So for, now until, say, October when I close the annexes, we’re going to see a lot of attrition.”

But the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association said the closures simply don’t make sense, that the state can’t handle fewer facilities, and argues savings should come from streamlining the whole system. NYSCOPBA said the closures may force workers to move to keep their job, even after a two-percent reduction in the workforce last year.

The plan, outlined [on Friday] by Schwarzenegger’s corrections chief, Matthew Cate, resembles past proposals offered by the department that have met with strong opposition from local law enforcement officials and have ultimately been withdrawn.  But in a concession to those groups, Cate said his agency would propose legislation enabling police to search former prisoners and seize their property without a warrant for at least three years after their release, even if they are not placed on parole.

The plan would reduce the number of parolees monitored by the state by more than 30,000 from the current 114,000. As a result, fewer would also be sent back to prison for parole violations. Together with the additional time off their sentences that inmates could earn by completing programs, state lockups would see an estimated reduction of about 8,000 prisoners, on average, from the initiative.

Even with the cuts, Cate said, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is unlikely to reach the $400 million in spending reductions for the coming fiscal year ordered by the governor when he signed the budget approved by lawmakers in February.   Cate said other elements of the department’s plan include cuts of up to 200 positions at the agency’s headquarters in Sacramento, about 10% of its workforce there; adjusting upward the dollar value of property crimes needed for them to be prosecuted as a felony, to account for inflation; and using satellite tracking technology on parolees who commit technical violations, such as failing a drug test or missing an appointment, as an alternative to sending them back to prison.

“Unless I’ve totally misread this thing, I think we’re extremely close to an agreement, and public safety will not be affected,” Hendershott said.  The Sheriff’s Office could take a $7.6 million cut to its general fund, which primarily pays for law-enforcement patrol, and a $10.1 million cut to its detention fund, which covers jail operations, memos show. Officials are still negotiating the budget and said these are tentative cuts. The memos indicate that public safety would not be jeopardized by the following cuts, a goal of both sides:

• Eliminate vacant civilian positions to save $2.3 million. It is unclear how many positions could be cut and how many are now filled.

• Discontinue vehicle rentals to save $411,000. The rentals are used for investigations, picking up abused animals and transporting equipment.

• Reduce costs for aviation, ammunition, uniforms, supplies, education and travel to save about $1.4 million.

• Reduce overtime for patrol officers, administrative staff and other employees to save $1.4 million.

• Reduce extradition and travel to save $500,000.

• Eliminate vacant positions to save $3 million; this cut would not affect detention officers.

• Change the jails’ food-distribution system to save $926,000.

Hendershott said budget officials would trim the general fund by increasing the number of furlough days to 15 for all staff to save $3.6 million, cutting four sworn but vacant captain positions to save $626,000 and reducing repairs and maintenance by $500,000 for technology programs.  On the detention side, Hendershott said budget officials would increase the number of furlough days to 13 to save $6.2 million.

There is more background and detail in the full article at AZCentral.com.