For more information on the following story, contact Steve Smith at [email protected] or (765) 285-5102.
JAIL POPULATIONS CAN BE REDUCED, SAVING TAXPAYERS MILLIONS
MUNCIE, Ind. -- America's "get tough" attitude with criminals is filling community jails beyond capacity and costing taxpayers millions of dollars, says a Ball State University study.
A survey of several county jails in Indiana found that inmate population growth is outpacing available beds, said Steve Smith and Stephen Brodt, criminal justice professors.
Many Indiana counties are being forced -- either by lawsuit or political pressure -- to expand existing facilities or build new ones to meet the demand to house a growing jail population, they said.
"Jails are incredibly expensive to build and maintain," Smith said. "In one case, a jail that was built to house fewer than 100 people had over 200 inmates."
Factors causing the explosion in the jail population are "get tough" attitudes by judges, legislators and prosecutors, and mandatory jail sentences for everything from violating a suspended driver's license to failure to pay child support, he said.
The survey also found that 60 percent of jail inmates were incarcerated on non-violent charges.
"Judges and prosecutors think that every offender should be locked up," Smith said. "Judges want offenders to go to jail if convicted because they are there to protect the public. Prosecutors think it is their job to send everyone to jail because that is why they were elected.
"Each time we send someone to jail for a non-violent crime, the taxpayers have to pay for that person to sit in a cell, watch television and become less employable," he said. "There are
options to putting people behind bars."
Smith said using work release, at-home sentencing, intensive probation, day reporting and other programs to punish non-violent offenders would help alleviate the jail overcrowding problem.
No single correctional program is the answer. A continuous control of utilizing programs that have reasonable caseloads will maximize community safety and minimize taxpayer costs, he said.
"It is clear that judges and prosecutors will feel the heat if they allow an individual to remain in the community and that person harms someone," he said. "It is important to conduct accurate and well-documented pre-sentence investigation reports to make a decision to jail a person, if required."
Because Indiana has a budget surplus and jails are a local, not state issue, funding for overcrowded facilities has not created a major budget crunch yet, Smith said.
"Building and operating jails takes away monies from other services desperately needed by communities, including schools, roads and sewers," he said. "We are soon going to be spending more money to lock people up than to educate our children."
(NOTE TO EDITORS: For more information, contact Smith at [email protected] or (765) 285-5102. For more stories visit the Ball State University News Center at www.bsu.edu/news on the World Wide Web.)
Marc Ransford
11/16/99
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