When last week’s Rhode Island House Finance Committee
hearing on state spending turned to the Department of Corrections, lawmakers were not pleased to discover that running the state’s prisons has cost more
than anticipated.

Finance Chairman Steve Costantino and Rep. David Caprio fired sharp questions at A.T. Wall, the state’s longtime corrections commissioner.

How come, they asked, is the prison overtime budget so large? Why aren’t there fewer inmates? And why can’t the state save more money in the prison budgets?

The prison is one of those dark corners of the state budget that doesn’t get much attention from either the media or lawmakers.

But the cost of the Orwellian-named Department of Corrections has soared over recent decades. In 1986, taxpayers spent about $34 million on a prison system that had about 1,350 inmates. In the current fiscal year, that cost will be about $190 million for a prison population nearly three times as large.

Rhode Island’s population of about a million people has been pretty stable during that time. And violent crime has actually dropped in recent years.

So why do we have so many prisoners and such a large prison
budget?

Well, maybe our lawmakers should look in the mirror. For too many years the General Assembly approved feel-good legislation cracking down on crime and drugs with long and mandatory prison terms that gave judges little leeway in sentencing.

When these lawmakers voted for these laws in the 1980s and 1990s, few Rhode Islanders challenged them. After all, who could be against sending those nasty criminals and drug abusers to jail.

One who did stand up to these legislators and their media cheerleaders was Steven Brown, the hard-working State House lobbyist for the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

In most cases at the State House, a financial impact statement, called a fiscal note in State House jargon, accompanies legislation.
But in their zeal to look like they were getting tough on crime, lawmakers did not consider the consequences to taxpayers.

It isn’t only the direct costs of running the Adult Correctional Institutions. Putting more people in jail means building bigger prisons and hiring more public defenders, more prosecutors, more police and more prison guards.

Rhode Island isn’t alone in erecting this huge, taxpayer–supported drug, crime police, lawyer and prison guard industry. With about 2.3 million people in jail, the United States incarcerates more
people than any other country in the world. Our per capita rate is six times greater than Canada’s, eight times greater than France’s,
and twelve times greater than Japan’s.

According to Wall, the state corrections chief, about 70 percent of current inmates have drug and alcohol problems. That compares to
less than 10 percent 24 years ago when Wall started working as a state correction officer.

And while there have been some recent initiatives to roll back some of the mandatory sentencing laws, the Assembly persists in approving crack-down-on crime laws without even asking what it might cost.

Exhibit A is the recent law to make indoor prostitution illegal. How much money will it cost taxpayers to prosecute and jail prostitutes and their customers? As far as the Rhode Island General Assembly is concerned, it's another case of don’t ask, don’t tell.