Commentary by PAT MURPHY
After putting up with mocking derision about its low standings on national
lists, Idaho at long last claims the No. 1 national slot in at least one field.
Idaho’s prisons are filling faster than in any of the other 50
states—a rate of 12.9 percent a year.
Idaho prisons (which don’t include local jails) have a capacity of
5,200 inmates—and as of Monday morning, when I checked with the state Department of
Corrections, the head count was 5,073. By month’s end, the max should be reached.
Ah, but don’t despair: help is on the way, if a little late.
The lock-‘em-up-throw-away-the-keys politicians in the state capital
have a no-brainer grand plan—build more prisons. The announced cost of $85 million
for the initial 2,250 new beds is a deception.
Actually, it’ll cost double that—financing of bonds would shoot
the eventual payoff up to $150 million over 19 years.
Once those new beds are filled, then politicians would return with more
plans for more prisons and more bond issues.
This spare-no-expense, tough-guy stance may be good politics, but not very
smart and certainly not wise use of public funds.
The proposed new prison, as I calculate, would eventually cost $66,666 per
bed—enough for a pretty decent little home for any family in Idaho.
But there’s more.
According to a Department of Corrections official, average upkeep cost of
an inmate is $50.54 a day, or $18,447-a-year.
So, after politicians order tens of millions of dollars in prisons,
taxpayers then are billed for tens of millions of dollars more in upkeep.
Behind the swaggering tough talk about taking criminals off the streets,
politicians avoid the ultimate reality—costs may not be justified.
Idaho’s prisons are being loaded up with nonviolent offenders who
could as easily be sentenced to non-prison diversion and probation programs that are
measurably far less costly, that serve the objectives of corrections and end the insanity
of building prisons at breakneck speeds to satisfy politically-motivated laws.
Most Idaho prisoners are drug offenders—1,781 inmates (23 percent).
Embezzlement accounts for 1,007 prisoners (13 percent). Traffic convictions, 542 prisoners
(7 percent); forgery, 507 inmates (7 percent); driving while intoxicated, 96 inmates (1.23
percent); bad checks 113 prisoners (1 percent); malicious injury to property, 65 inmates
(0.83 percent); fraud, 27 inmates (0.34 percent).
That amounts to 53.4 percent, more than half the prison population, and
doesn’t include a handful of inmates locked up for bribery and larceny.
Now ask yourself: are those inmates threats to society, as are murderers
and sexual predators? Can imprisonment at a capital cost of $67,555 per cell and $18,477
for each inmate’s upkeep be justified? Idaho politicians could make a more
intelligent decision by investing those tens of millions of dollars in public
schools—a field in which Idaho needs considerable improvement—rather than on
minimum risk prisoners.
So while Idaho spends $18,477 per year on each prison inmate, the state
allocates $6,251 for each public school student.
Thinking taxpayers will figure out where politicians have gone wrong.
