Outgoing Gov. Bill Owens presented his fiscal swan song to the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee last week, urging Colorado’s money mavens to pour extra dollars into his favorite programs of highways and prisons.
The emphasis on bolstering highway funding makes perfect sense, given Colorado’s ill-maintained and inadequate transportation network. But prison expansion is a broken record. We’d rather see lawmakers restore funding for higher education.
Colorado’s approach to building new prisons resembles an unsuccessful dieter’s approach to eating peanuts: The state can’t stop at just one. The state now has about 18,300 men and 2,100 women in prison, and their ranks are rising much faster than our population. Since 1990, Colorado has built 16 new prisons (not a typo), including four private prisons. Corrections officials estimate we’ll need to build a new 800-bed prison each year into the indefinite future just to warehouse all the new inmates. It costs taxpayers about $26,082 a year for each man in prison and $27,900 per female inmate.
In contrast to the rapid expansion of prison space, our higher education network, from community colleges through research universities, has been on a starvation diet since the TABOR amendment was passed in 1992. The result of that long neglect became clear Thursday when an independent study found Colorado’s colleges and universities would need $832 million just to meet the average funding levels enjoyed by their peer institutions in other states.
Those numbers will surprise no one who has followed higher education’s declining fortunes in Colorado for the last dozen years. Yet, Owens urged an 8.7 percent hike in the upcoming budget for prisons and just a 7.2 percent increase in higher education.
Owens warned the legislators not to try to trim his proposed $51 million increase in the corrections budget by reforming any of the state’s sometimes draconian mandatory minimum-sentencing laws. We don’t agree.
Instead of a prison-a-year building program, we need to review our laws, especially for drug-related offenses. It’s time to put more emphasis on rehabilitation and treatment and less on incarceration. A good example of such an approach came in 2003, when Sen. Ken Gordon, D-Denver, and Rep. Lynn Hefley, R-Colorado Springs, passed SB 318. The bill slightly shortened sentences for possession of one gram or less of drugs and used the savings to treat prisoners with substance-abuse problems.
Sentencing reform, where appropropriate, can free up money now spent on evergrowing prison costs to bolster education.
As parents, we’d much rather have our kids go to college than to prison. We feel the same way about our money.
