Five years after the state opened the doors on new prison facilities costing more than $140 million, the Criminal Justice Committee and the Department of Corrections say more space is needed to alleviate overcrowding that is only going to get worse by the end of this decade.

“We’ll have to think about bricks and mortar,” said Sen. Bill Diamond, D-Cumberland County, the Senate chairman of the Criminal Justice Committee. “We can’t continue to call ourselves tough on crime and not have cells to put people in.”

Diamond was speaking last week at a press conference designed to highlight the problems of prison overcrowding that have existed almost since the day the new prison facilities approved by the Legislature under the King administration opened.

Those facilities included an addition to the maximum security prison in Warren – and the closing of the old Maine State Prison in Thomaston; a new women’s unit with 70 beds at the Maine Correctional Center in Windham; and, construction of new juvenile facilities in South Portland and Charleston.

While the juvenile population has declined in state facilities, the adult prison population is on the rise. Capacity at the state’s six adult facilities is 1,946, but the number of inmates is expected to hit 2,192 by the end of this year and 2,245 by the end of 2009. The women’s population as part of that group has also grown beyond the 70 beds available to 134 this month, and at times last year was at 141. The original request for the new women’s unit was for 100 beds, but that was apparently cut back to save money on construction overruns.

“Treatment set up for women has been working,” said Rep. Stan Gerzofsky, D-Brunswick, the House chairman of the Criminal Justice Committee, but there is not enough room in the women’s unit, where rehabilitative services are available. “Some women are spending their entire sentence in a holding cell.”

Gerzofsky said he knows it will be a tough sell to get voters to approve a prison bond, since they have turned so many down in recent memory – 1989, 1990 and 1991.

“You can pass a bond in Maine as long as it isn’t about prisons,” Gerzofsky said, adding, “Clearly they (voters) want people locked up,” but don’t want to pay for new prison space.

In 1998, Gov. Angus King got around the process by using the Maine Governmental Facilities Authority, which can issue bonds without voter approval, to build the new prison at Warren and the new women’s facility in Windham. The juvenile facilities were built with available state funds.

Prison costs

The call for more prison spending comes at a time when state agencies are competing for dwindling state resources, and policy makers are looking for places to find money to shift toward economic development. The much-discussed Brookings Institution report on Maine’s future prosperity references a study done by Philip Trostel of the University of Maine, which says prison spending per inmate in Maine is way above the national average.

Despite the rising prison population, Maine still has the lowest incarceration rate in the nation. Yet it spends more per inmate than most other states.

Trostel’s report said the state has the second highest per-inmate cost in the country. A report from the National Conference of State Legislatures puts it in sixth place.

Officials from the state Department of Corrections, all too aware of the criticism, say the numbers are wrong. They point to other statistics that show Maine ranks 45th among other states in terms of the amount it spends on corrections per Maine resident.

Trostel agrees that in overall expenditures, the state is low relative to other states, largely because Maine has so few people in jail.

“Given that Maine’s relative inmate population is about 73 percent below the national average, it could be argued that Maine’s correction payroll and expenditure should be more than the 32 percent and 36 percent below the national average,” he said.

Stiffer penalties

The existing cost of the system – with a budget of $145 million for this coming fiscal year as compared to $97 million at the start of the decade – and the prospect of housing more inmates cannot be good news to taxpayers. Yet, as several members of the Criminal Justice Committee pointed out last week, people are demanding stiffer sentences for a variety of crimes.

“We’re a creature of our own success,” said Gerzofsky, where “Legislation keeps on calling for stiffer and stiffer penalties.”

Rep. Janet Mills, D-Farmington, a former district attorney who now sits on the Appropriations and Judiciary committees, said one problem causing the overcrowding is the harshness of the law for those who violate probation.

“We end up with approximately a third of the prison population doing time on probation violations and bail violations, often for ‘technical’ or non-criminal behavior,” she said. “Common sense tells us that enacting more mandatory sentences has also impacted the prison system. The trouble is, the Department of Corrections never puts a real fiscal note on such criminal justice bills. They generally say instead, ‘costs will be assumed within existing resources,’ or ‘there will be no impact in the current biennium,'” Mills said.

“I fault the department and the Criminal Justice Committee in great part for doing

things that are politically appealing, but not acknowledging the costs of policies and laws they recommend, either to the state or to the county jails and the property taxpayers,” Mills said.

Christopher “Kit” St. John of the Maine Center for Economic Policy, which advocates for social programs and public policies that help the poor, said while he has not studied the prison population recently, in general, “We are too quick to lock people up for too long a time.”

“Every time there’s an awful thing that happens, there’s a bill to extend sentences,” he said. “We need to be more careful about what sentences to impose on people who are not violent.”