By Alex De Grand, Legal Writer, State Bar of Wisconsin

April 23, 2009 - Almost $2.5 billion of corrections costs over the next decade could be averted with $150 million of investments and changed policies for prisoners on supervised release, according to recommendationsdelivered April 22 to a special legislative committee studying criminal justice issues in Wisconsin.

The Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Centerhad previously reported to the Special Committee on Justice Reinvestment Oversightthat under current trends, Wisconsin will roughly double existing funding by 2019 to finance a prison population forecasted to grow 25 percent. The special committee includes legislators, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and other stakeholders in the criminal justice system. The committee is chaired by Sen. Lena Taylor (D-Milwaukee).

Working with numbers from the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, the CSG researchers attributed a great percentage of the ballooning prison population to revocations of those who did not comply with the conditions of their community supervision, but had not been convicted of committing a new crime.

The recommendations

Mental illness, substance abuse, and unemployment are causing inmates on supervised release to head back to prison, the researchers found in an earlier report. Yet, the researchers continued, supervising agents often lack resources to tailor an appropriate sanction for noncompliance and can only recommend the offender return to prison. The researchers also critiqued risk assessment tools that label too many supervisees “high risk.” Recommendations directed at these problems include:

• Reduce resources currently allocated to incarcerate people revoked from extended supervision (ES) with no new sentence and expand community-based mental health and employment strategies.
  
• Expand community-based mental health services for people released from prison on to ES who have a serious mental illness and pose a high risk to public safety.
  
• Expand the state’s transitional employment and job placement services for people on community supervision.
  
• Establish a swift and certain reconfinement period of six months for people whose ES has been revoked but who have not been convicted of committing a new crime.
  
• Allow the DOC to hold an offender up to 90 days beyond the six-month reconfinement period (i.e., nine months total) for institutional infractions or failure to participate in required programs.
  
• Improve assessment processes, align supervision resources according to risk and needs, connect offenders to the right services to reduce violations, and tailor responses to violations to improve compliance.
  
• Expand the capacity of community-based alternatives to revocations, such as substance abuse treatment, day reporting centers, and other sanctions and services.

The researchers identified a need to better address an offender’s underlying problems during adjudication and imprisonment – not just during post-release supervision. The researchers also said the current system does not offer sufficient incentives for an inmate to improve him or herself. Accordingly, the group recommended:

• Provide the court with the ability to impose a “risk reduction sentence” that is three-quarters the length of an ordinary term of confinement, but requires the offender to complete prior to release programs designed to reduce risk to public safety. If the offender does not successfully complete the required programs, he or she will serve the entirety of the ordinary confinement sentence.
  
• Require the DOC to complete a comprehensive and validated risk/needs assessment for each offender admitted with a risk reduction sentence. After determining which programs the offender will be required to complete, the DOC would notify the sentencing judge of the results of the assessment and required programs.

Excluding sex offenders and Class A-C felons, the researchers advised that periods of ES should be capped at 75 percent of the length of confinement time. Since 2000, the time an offender spends under supervision has more than doubled, prolonging the risk of reincarceration.

Committee member and Marquette County District Attorney Richard Dufour cautioned that if terms of supervision are reduced, the state must retain some means of ensuring offenders pay restitution. Committee member Rep. Tamara Grigsby (D-Milwaukee) also noted that efforts to trim supervised release time would have to be reconciled with other proposals for early release before the Legislature.

Rep. Joel Kleefisch (R- Oconomowoc) worried that a push to reduce revocations might merely prompt supervising agents to refrain from enforcing the conditions of release, harming the interests of victims. Tony Fabelo, director of research for the CSG Justice Reinvestment Initiative, acknowledged that concern is serious, but said if these initiatives are done correctly, victims gain as crime rates drop. Fabelo referred to similar reformsundertaken in Texas that reduced the prison population and the crime rate at the same time.

Researchers predict that with its recommended policy changes, the state’s prison population in 2019 would remain relatively constant at 2009 levels. Without changes, they reported, prisoners numbering 23,125 in 2009 will grow to 28,018 in 2019.

The cost

CSG researchers projected that the cost of its recommendations would amount to $30 million during each of the next five biennium budgets. If nothing is done, the researchers warned, DOC estimates indicate the state will spend in the next 10 years $1.4 billion in new prison construction and $1.1 billion in new cumulative operating costs to respond to overcrowding.

Rep. Scott Suder (R- Abbotsford) said that his law-abiding constituents, struggling in the current recession, may object to taxpayer dollars spent on job creation for criminals. Marshall Clement, the CSG project director, acknowledged that point and said Wisconsin lawmakers could opt to change nothing. However, he said that under the current policies, taxpayers are looking to spend far more money on criminals to incarcerate them than that proposed to put them in legitimate employment.

Under questioning from committee member Maxine White, the deputy chief judge for the 1st Judicial District, the researchers conceded that their cost estimates are not complete. For example, the researchers did not calculate the expense of all the extra due process hearings necessitated by the proposed “risk reduction sentencing.”

Next meeting

The committee is scheduled to meet again at 10 a.m. on May 6 at the Capitol and could vote on these recommendations at that time.