Articles & NewsMarch 21, 2009 Corrections more costly in our state
There is virtually no way to avoid reduced
education spending in our state in the coming months.
That was the message Gov. Jan Brewer sent this week while speaking to a group in Phoenix, as she and the Arizona Legislature look at what spending they can cut to balance the state's budget for the next fiscal year, as required by law. There are a couple of reasons for that certainty. First, a majority of state funding goes to public education in some form or another. Second, a big portion of the budget is off limits to budget cutters because the money comes from taxpayer-approved program initiatives - including ones for education - which lawmakers are not allowed to touch. That means there is a very narrow range of programs which can actually be cut. Avoiding more education reductions is essentially impossible without raising taxes - an unpopular proposition - or removing barriers to cutting protected programs. Even then there might not enough money to avoid public school cutbacks. It is an unhappy situation since many people feel education is the backbone of the state's future. It is hoped the impact can be minimized by finding less essential or less worthy programs to reduce. One of those programs might be state corrections, although it represents a relatively small part of state spending in relation to the amount spent on education. Still, a recent Associated Press report noted that Arizona's corrections system - which includes prisons, probation and parole programs - is more expensive than all but three other states. A study by The Pew Center found that Arizona spent 9.5 percent of the state general fund - or $951 million - on corrections last year. It wasn't always that way. The state's corrections population went up 60 percent between 1997 and 2007. Some of that can be blamed on our state's explosive population growth, but another factor is the increased emphasis in past years on getting offenders off the streets and keeping them in prison. Keeping someone in prison isn't cheap. The Pew study noted that it costs on average nearly $80 a day to imprison someone. Compare that with $3.42 per day to supervise someone on probation. Obviously, keeping people out of prison, when possible, is the way to go for the state to save money and divert it to other desired needs, like education. Putting more emphasis on probation, parole and treatment programs outside prison can have a big payoff. It also is worthwhile to look at reserving expensive incarceration for the worst criminals - meaning those who are violent - rather than drug offenses, property crimes and moral crimes like prostitution. All of these measures could help minimize corrections expenses. Would that save education from cutbacks? Probably not, given the proportion of the state budget going to that area. But it might reduce the necessary cutbacks. -- Terry Ross is director of The Sun's News and Information Center. E-mail him at tross@yumasun.com or telephone him at 539-6870.
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