The cost of corrections.

• Author: Eckl, Corina
• Position: State corrections budgets

Taking a bite out of crime has been expensive for states. With crime rates slowing, can states curb corrections costs?

Nationally, state corrections spending growth has slowed. No, this isn't a misprint. For more than a decade, spending for adult prisoners was one of the fastest growing categories of state budgets and showed no sign of abating. State corrections budgets almost tripled, growing from $7 billion in 1986 to more than $20 billion 10 years later. Corrections' share of the general fund budget pie also rose, from 3 percent to 6 percent.

So when state officials built their FY 1997 budgets, they anticipated that past spending trends would continue. But they miscalculated. Instead of the 6.2 percent budgeted increase, corrections spending grew by one-third that amount, up only 2 percent.

Was the situation in FY 1997 an aberration? Many states say no. Some of the big-budget states reported that substantial increases for corrections over the past few years have boosted the spending base, so modest increases were sufficient to meet the needs in FY 1997. Further, a number of states noted that the prison building binge has ended or has slowed considerably. While this certainly is not true for all states, it appears to be true for some of the large states whose spending actions drive the national numbers.

At the same time that corrections spending seems to be under control, crime rates are dropping, in some cases dramatically. Reports released in 1997 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department both showed steady and sizable declines in crime over the past few years. The Justice Department reported that the number of Americans victimized by crime in 1996 fell to the lowest level since the government began collecting such data in 1973. Violent crime fell 10 percent and property crime fell 8 percent. According to crime experts, these reports demonstrate a trend and not a short-term or random fluctuation. One result is a slowdown in prison admissions.

What accounts for falling crime rates? It's difficult to say. According to Jeffrey Fagan, director of the Center for Violence Research and Prevention at Columbia University, "Nobody really knows why people stop committing crime." Commonly cited explanations include demographic changes - especially a decline in the number of teenagers and young adults in age groups prone to commit crimes - shrinking drug markets, improved police tactics, longer prison sentences and higher incarceration rates, better security and surveillance, and cultural changes among adolescents and young adults to reject violence.

So what do all of these developments mean for state policymakers as they consider corrections issues and budgets? To answer this question, it's helpful to review what drives corrections spending. The two biggest factors are the number of prisoners and length of incarceration.

A GROWTH INDUSTRY

The number of state prisoners has more than doubled in a decade, growing from 500,564 inmates in 1986 to almost 1.1 million by the end of 1996. Put another way, the number of state prisoners now exceeds the populations of eight states and the District of Columbia. The dramatic increase in inmates traces back to a decade of state policies to "get tough on crime" and explains the prison building boom that occurred over the same period. Although construction has been costly, the bulk of the expense is ongoing: A full two-thirds of corrections budgets are used to operate, maintain and staff prisons.

In addition to housing more prisoners, states also are faced with growing incarceration costs. The Criminal Justice Institute reports that the average per-inmate cost in 1989 was $16,947. But by 1996, that cost had grown to $19,801. Many experts believe actual per-inmate costs are much higher because they typically don't include retirement system contributions, employee health benefits, cost of defending states in litigation and costs of central administration such as accounting and payroll processing. These growing expenses explain...