Maryland Prison System: Costs, Overcrowding, and Reform

Introduction: The Cost of Punishment

Crime is expensive. But so too is punishment. The state of Maryland, like the majority of states across the nation, is facing a period of slow economic growth and shrinking resources even as it continues to meet the needs of its citizens. This paper examines the effect on the state's overall budget of the cost of incarcerating prisoners.

The treatment of prisoners causes few legal problems for the government of a dictatorship. A government that refuses to acknowledge the human rights of even its law-abiding citizens is not likely to show many qualms about placing its criminals in overcrowded and unsafe prisons — or even to worry about whether the niceties of due process were observed in getting a person there in the first place. But the rule of constitutional law changes all that. Because we live in a country in which the rule of law is for the most part respected, the police, the courts, prison officials, and the rest of us as well must recognize that prisoners are people who have broken the social contract — but people nonetheless, like the rest of us. It is from this recognition of our common humanity that the belief in rehabilitation and the rights of prisoners to receive educational, vocational, and other rehabilitative services arises.

Money spent on prisons in Maryland cannot be spent on schools, parks, or firefighters. This is a relatively straightforward lesson — but if there is a single truth in the state budgeting process, it is that economics and politics are tightly bound to each other. A state budget may be mathematics at the bottom, but it is always much more than mathematics at every other level.

The 2003 fiscal year budget saw significant cuts in a number of state services, including:

$6.7 million in cuts to the State Department of Education; $40 million cut to higher education (representing a 20% reduction to a budget that constitutes only 7.5% of total state spending); $84 million to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene; $11.6 million to the Department of Human Resources; $9.7 million to community colleges; and $1 million from the National Guard.

The current budget for corrections in Maryland is over $900 million. Over the past two decades, Maryland's state prison population rose from 8,000 to 24,000 by 2001. The per capita rate of incarceration during that same period grew from 183 to 422 per 100,000 inhabitants. The costs associated with that kind of prison growth are massive. During the 1980s and 1990s, Maryland's per capita state spending on corrections grew by 100% — four times the rate of increase in higher education spending.

The proponents of prison expansion point to these numbers and argue that high incarceration rates are the unavoidable cost of remaining safe in our communities. But there are several serious flaws in the view that large prison populations, and their associated costs, are the unavoidable price of safety in a modern society.

Methodology: Examining the Scope of the Problem

States, like families, have limited budgets, and money spent on one type of service cannot also be spent on something else. In Maryland, as in other states, a very high percentage of the state's money goes toward the cost of building prisons and incarcerating prisoners. The primary reason for this upswing in incarceration costs is the increasing number of people sentenced to prison for nonviolent and often quite minor drug offenses. In order to understand how the state makes a monetary commitment to the prison system, we must understand a number of factors that go beyond pure economics.

The current state administration in Maryland has been pushing for a reduction in the incarceration of nonviolent offenders with relatively minor drug charges, but the effects of this push on the criminal justice system — and so on the state's budget — have not yet been dramatic. The state is still paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to convict and incarcerate people for crimes that most people would consider relatively minor.

A report released by the Justice Policy Institute on February 21, 2003, found that capital spending on Maryland prisons would increase by $92 million while 30 of 54 state agencies were facing budget cuts. The report noted that in the previous two decades the state's prison population had tripled — from 7,731 in 1980 to 23,752 at the end of 2001. The report found that 24% of inmates in Maryland's prisons are drug offenders and that nonviolent offenders are languishing behind bars as the number of prisoners paroled each year has fallen by 29%. Racial disparities in the Maryland justice system were also highlighted: 81% of all drug offenders are African American, even though they represent only 28% of Maryland's population.

The emphasis on incarcerating those guilty of drug-related infractions — as compared, for example, to those guilty of highly violent crimes — is striking. Although the national prison population has increased 500% during the past 25 years, since 1980 the number of violent offenders in prisons has doubled, while the number of nonviolent offenders has tripled and the number of drug offenders has increased eleven-fold.

According to the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, the most common offense for which prisoners are incarcerated in Maryland is "drug abuse," which accounts for nearly one in four prisoners.

Drug use is not necessarily trivial and can certainly be dangerous. However, the majority of arrests for drug offenses in Maryland involved the possession of small amounts of marijuana, which the state does not record as having caused any deaths in recent years.

The overall cost of incarcerating the state's prison population is staggering, with the great majority of funding for the prison system drawn from the state's general budget — in other words, reducing money that could otherwise be spent on a range of other programs. When these percentages are translated into actual figures, the picture becomes even more dramatic. These figures make clear that Maryland, like other states, must seek ways to control prison costs if it is to continue offering the full range of services that a state should provide to its residents.

The cost of building new prisons and housing more prisoners is only likely to increase given that the number of arrests continues to climb each year. Although the rate of violent crimes is falling, the number of arrests and prisoners continues to rise.

Increasingly Crowded Prisons

Inhumane jails are relatively cheap — certainly cheaper than more humane ones. The single most important reason for this is that the less politicians, prison officials, and the public care about the welfare of prisoners, the more prisoners can be housed in a single facility. Maryland's prisons, like those of other states, are suffering from serious overcrowding. Prison officials are investigating a number of possible programs to reduce the number of inmates in the system and thereby reduce the cost to the state.

This is an increasingly important budgetary concern because the prison population is not only growing but also aging. This "aging" of the prison population in some measure mirrors the aging of the broader population. However, it also reflects an increase in the number of life sentences handed down as part of the growing conservatism of sentencing trends in Maryland and in the United States generally.

Projections through 2010 indicate that the number of inmates aged 51 and over will grow substantially, adding over 1,200 prisoners to that age cohort. The average sentence length and average length of stay are both increasing, driven in part by a growing number of life sentences.

This trend suggests one of the key reasons why the prison population is aging: the increasing number of prisoners who have been given life sentences, many of them because of Maryland's three-strikes law.

As is the case in other states with similar laws, Maryland is suffering from the unintended consequences of three-strikes legislation, which has dramatically increased the prison population and so the costs to taxpayers:

Despite the great support for and legislative adoption of "three strikes" laws that began in 1993 — culminating with California's first enactment in 1994 — many critics feel that this law has not delivered what it promised. Much of the criticism attacks "three strikes" laws as ill-advised policy, a quick-fix solution to the complex problem of crime, a policy with no or at best modest deterrent effect, and a significant financial burden to the correctional community and taxpayers. Furthermore, critics argue, the law — currently adopted by thirty-seven states — contains many inconsistencies across jurisdictions. These inconsistencies include which crimes (violent or nonviolent) count as a strike, the availability or denial of parole, whether the person should be sentenced as a habitual offender, and whether the offender should receive a mandatory life sentence. In response, some states such as Washington suggest that "three strikes" laws are effective given proper implementation (King & Mauer, 2001).

Research on three-strikes laws across the nation, including in Maryland, tends to find that such laws imprison nonviolent offenders rather than those who present a significant risk of harm to the community, have little if any deterrent effect, and are extremely costly to the taxpayer. According to experts, "three strikes" laws have not had a significant impact on reducing crime. The evidence on deterrence suggests that the policy has had modest to negligible effects. The main objective — to incarcerate violent offenders — has been largely neglected. Most offenders receiving sentences under three-strikes provisions have been drug, property, or other nonviolent offenders. In California, the Department of Corrections reported that 57.9% of third-strike cases involved nonviolent offenses, as did 69% of second-strike cases (King & Mauer, 2001).

So the question remains: is "three strikes" a sensible policy? The majority of the research presents a negative view, though some researchers point out that it is difficult to determine causation given the downward national crime trend and other economic changes occurring since the early 1990s. One consistent projection is that "three strikes" laws will contribute substantially to the aging of the prison population. This poses a serious threat to the correctional system in future years, since elderly inmates — those aged 50 and over — require greater expenditures for health care and other special needs than younger prisoners. Current estimates are that it will cost $1.5 million to incarcerate an elderly prisoner for the minimum 25 years that represents the sentence for a third-strike conviction (King & Mauer, 2001). The picture painted by this summary is grim for Maryland as it is for other states.

Conclusion

Those who favor incarceration — and most of us do in a general sense — also assume that the social and economic costs of isolating a criminal from the rest of society are less than those incurred if he or she had been left free. All of this makes good sense, but it still leaves us rather where we began. There are serious problems in the current prison system: it is overcrowded, it does not reform people, and in many places it must make a person of good conscience wonder how we can treat our fellow human beings so callously — allowing prisoners who enter healthy to emerge with lethal viruses. When the problems of the correctional system are compounded by the costs of prisons forcing cuts in other areas of state-provided services such as education, the problem becomes even graver. Maryland, like other states, must find the political will to pursue sentencing reform, expand alternatives to incarceration, and invest in rehabilitation if it hopes to break the cycle of rising costs and recidivism that currently defines its correctional system.

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