North Carolina could soon face another scramble for prison space if legislators fail to act on the problem this year, according to a recent budget briefing for the General Assembly.
“The correction budget has grown about 16.6 percent in the last two years,” said Jim Mills, lead correction budget analyst for the legislature’s Fiscal Research Division. “The prison population is continuing to grow. Projections compared to the bed capacity the Department of Correction currently has and will have in the future show that North Carolina will be 2,500 beds short by the year 2011.”
That later date is closer than it appears. “Some decisions are going to need to be made in 2007,” Mills said. “If some decisions are made to build additional prison beds to deal with this shortage, it takes typically from design to actually getting inmates into the prison between three and four years.”
Education and health and human services programs take the largest chunks of the state budget, but prisons and other correction programs account for $1.16 billion in annual state spending, or about 6 percent of the budget.
“Staffing is a major component of that budget — 76 percent of the budget,” Mills said, “to staff prisons, to staff caseloads for probation and parole. That’s 20,000 employees.”
Other factors increasing costs include: repair and maintenance of more than 70 prisons; equipment; prisoners’ food, health care, and clothing; and work and education programs.
“For 2005-06, the average cost to operate a prison bed was $24,408,” Mills said. That ranges from $29,091 per bed in prisons with the most security to $20,006 in minimum- custody prisons.
North Carolina prisons now house more dangerous inmates than they handled in past years, Mills said. That’s because the state’s 1994 structured sentencing law was designed to force inmates convicted of more serious crimes to spend more time behind bars.
At the end of 1995, the state had an overall prison population of 29,485 inmates. Thirty-six percent of them had been convicted of the worst felonies. By the start of this year, total population had grown to 37,725 inmates, and 56 percent of them had been convicted of the worst felonies.
“The [inmate] population growth between 1996 and 2006 has been about 21 percent,” Mills said. Much of that increase can be tied to former inmates who had their probation revoked. The actual growth rate was about 28 percent.
Prison growth is no new issue for North Carolina. The legislature funded six 1,000-bed prisons from 2001 to 2005. Construction has cost $514 million, and annual operating costs exceed $120 million, Mills said. Lawmakers also have converted some temporary beds, expanded prison dorm capacity, and taken other steps to boost capacity.
But growth continues to push population over capacity, Mills said. “Bottom line, by 2008, North Carolina will be about 1,100 prison beds short,” he said. “By 2011, over 2,500 prison beds short, and at the end of the period, 2016, over 6,800 prison beds short.
“This assumes there’s no action taken for construction or other options. It also assumes there are no additional criminal penalty bills passed which would affect incarceration rates, which, of course, won’t happen. There will be additional bills passed.”
Legislative staffers already have seen as many as 20 bills this year that could increase criminal penalties and potentially increase the number of prison inmates, Mills said. If the measures win approval, they would follow other recent changes such as increased penalties for methamphetamine-related crimes and domestic violence.
The N.C. Department of Correction has a long-range plan to add 6,500 beds by 2015, Mills said. That plan consists mainly of expanding current prison sites and building new inmate dormitories.
Some lawmakers hope their colleagues will support alternatives that could dampen demand for new prison beds. They point to a series of alternatives developed by the state Sentencing Commission in 2002.
“We know now that some of the sentences are sort of placed wrong for the crime, you know the good ol’ ‘Let the sentence fit the crime,’” said Sen. Ellie Kinnaird, D-Orange. “The sentences are way too long for the type of crime. That uses up prison beds, so if we can lower those, we could save prison beds.”
Better investment in health and human service programs could reduce long-term demand for prison space, Kinnaird said. “We could put all the resources we need into families in trouble at the lowest rate,” she said. “Eighty percent of the children in juvenile justice [programs] have serious mental health problems. We know that 40 percent of the people in prison have serious mental health problems.
“We need to put our resources there. Let’s put the money there, and not in our prisons.”
Not every lawmaker agrees. “It’s always the case that education is first in line, and health and human and services is second in line,” said Rep. Joe Kiser, R-Lincoln, a former county sheriff. “That’s one reason that we find ourselves in the situation we are in with justice and public safety [funding]. In my opinion, we have not funded it adequately in the past.
“I don’t think there’s anything any more important than the public safety,” Kiser said. “When you lock people up who’ve committed crimes and keep them there for significant time, then the public is safer.”
Mitch Kokai is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.