TESTIMONY OF VIRGINIA C.U.R.E.

HOUSE APPROPRIATIONS COMMITTEE

SENATE FINANCE COMMITTEE

REGIONAL PUBLIC HEARINGS ON THE

GOVERNOR'S PROPOSED 2008-10 BIENNIAL STATE BUDGET

January 9, 2009

Thank you for the opportunity to present Virginia C.U.R.E.'s views on the Governor's proposed biennial budget. Virginia C.U.R.E. is a non-profit corporation whose focus is on the Virginia criminal justice and prison system and the inmates, families, and friends whose lives are impacted by these systems. Founded in 1988 and staffed solely with volunteers, Virginia C.U.R.E. provides information and support to prisoners and their families, works closely with the Department of Corrections and the Department of Correctional Education in efforts to improve prison conditions and educational and training programs, and seeks to identify ways to make Virginia's sentencing, parole, probation, and reentry programs for adult and juvenile offenders more effective.

Virginia C.U.R.E. appreciates the challenges posed by the currently estimated revenue shortfall of almost $3 billion. The Nation's current economic problems have not bypassed Virginia, and they force us to make difficult choices. In doing so, however, we would do well to remember the punch line from the well-known Fram oil filter ad of years ago: "You can pay me now, or you can pay me later."

As it relates to corrections policy, the current budget proposal misses the mark in two critical respects. First, it fails to recognize that today we no longer have the financial luxury of unnecessarily warehousing inmates at one of the highest rates of incarceration in the Nation. Rather than taking steps to ensure that those who are incarcerated are truly unsuitable for release, the proposal does the opposite. It proposes to save a mere $51,677 over two years by increasing from two to four the number of part-time only members of the Virginia Parole Board whose responsibility it is to make those determinations - leaving the Board with only one full time member. As noted below, a greater focus on this responsibility would have the potential of saving many millions of dollars in wasted expenditures each year.

Second, and in contrast, the proposal zeroes out or seriously curtails a number of modest but effective programs that are designed to ensure that those who enter our prisons can come out with realistic chances of successful and productive lives, rather than remaining or repeating as wards of the state who cost taxpayers some $23,000 per inmate per year. These programs are efforts to avoid what Senator Webb has characterized as a "mass of disenfranchised humanity [that] threatens to congeal into the bedrock of what is becoming a permanent underclass, . . . our own version of The Untouchables."¹ They are the very kinds of initiatives that DOC urged your committees last August to strengthen.²

We highlight below a number of these effective programs that we urge the General Assembly not to eliminate or substantially erode during the next two year budget cycle. We then address the recent recommendations of the Pew Center on the States and through the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project, which has recently recognized the serious drag on our economy posed by ineffective corrections policies. These studies highlight better ways of saving money that other states have identified in reducing incarceration rates that place the United States (including Virginia) at odds not only with other leading democracies but also with the likes of Russia, Belarus, and Azerbaijan.³

Department of Correctional Education

The importance of prison education in promoting successful reentry is by now well recognized, as Professor Bruce Western documents in his recent proposal sponsored by the Hamilton Project.⁴ Over the past several years, it has become increasingly difficult for Virginia inmates to prepare themselves for reentry by enhancing their education. Yet the current proposal would reduce operating funds for DCE and zero out 13 of its still vacant positions over the next two years, depriving it of over $3 million each year.

Department of Corrections

The current proposal would eliminate or drastically reduce a number of effective tools that DOC currently employs to address what leading authorities have recognized to be one of the major problems in U.S. corrections policy: treating those with drug problems as criminal offenders (who when released will likely require us to "pay later" for their return to the prison system) rather than persons who can be treated, trained, and reintroduced to society as productive taxpaying citizens.

• It would eliminate all funding for therapeutic transitional community programs ($972,000 in FY 2009 and $3,125,700 in FY 2010). These are modest but effective programs that provide the critical fifth step in promoting reentry by those whose offenses relate to substance abuse and who are within 18 months of release. The proposal would require shutdown of the oldest and largest of these programs, Gemeinschaft Home in Harrisonburg, which has 60 beds. This program, which houses prisoners during the last six months of their confinement, can actually be structured to cost less money than housing them in DOC facilities. A study by Dr. Peggy Plass at JMU conducted in cooperation with DOC has documented statistically significant improvements in rearrest, reconviction, and recommittal rates for Gemeinschaft participants compared to other drug offenders,⁵ following the General Assembly's establishment of the program in 1998. Its success has provided a model studied by other states, the U.S. Department of Justice, and even Japan.
• It eliminates counselor positions at Indian Creek Correctional Center, which at 984 beds is the largest of the "therapeutic community" substance abuse programs that provide the initial four steps of the foregoing treatment plan. This would save $68,587 in FY 2009 and $366,726 in FY 2010.
• It would eliminate positions used to support local drug courts, a program whose success has been demonstrated throughout many states and whose activity is supported by the Virginia Supreme Court. (This would save $100,659 in FY 2009 and $301,978 in FY 2010.) According to the most recent report to the General Assembly now available, staff of these courts cite the following benefits of these programs: reductions in recidivism that enhance public safety and potentially lead to lower long term costs, increased community awareness of substance abuse and related issues, and better access to treatment services.⁶

The current proposal would also eliminate five probation and parole officer positions that have not yet been filled. These services provide the Commonwealth's front line of defense in assuring that we can promote successful reentry into society by prior offenders so that taxpayers do not continue to pay for recommitment.

At the same time that it eliminates these probation and parole positions, the proposal would place even greater pressure on probation and parole authorities by eliminating the eleven remaining day reporting sites (staffed by 53 positions) that are tailored specifically to the problems of those in need of greater care and attention. These sites are located throughout the Commonwealth, in Fairfax (also serving Alexandria), Winchester, Harrisonburg, Roanoke, Abingdon, Norton, Norfolk, Newport News, Suffolk, Fredericksburg, Martinsville, and Tazewell. Last August, DOC urged your committees to fund additional day reporting programs in high sentencing jurisdictions such as Virginia Beach and Chesapeake, together with substance abuse treatment funds.⁷

Department of Criminal Justice Services

The current proposal would eliminate supplemental funding for the Chesterfield Day Reporting center for substance addicted offenders ($100,000 each year) and for the Fairfax Partnership on Youth ($75,000 in FY 2010).

Department of Juvenile Justice

The current proposal would reduce DJJ's funding by over $10 million, or 5%. Because of the proven returns from investments in children, this is the classic case of "pay me now, or pay me later." Intervention at a younger age is far more likely to be successful in preventing much larger - and much more expensive - expenditures for failures leading to long term incarceration in the future and increased risks to public safety. The cost to incarcerate a juvenile in a DJJ correctional center (including education through DCE) is now over $100,000 per year, per juvenile.⁸

A number of these cuts will perpetuate existing problems. The proposal would abolish 13 funded but already vacant treatment positions at various juvenile correctional centers ($923,000 each year), eliminate 39 probation and parole officer and six support positions in various community service units ($1,733,000 in FY 2009 and $2,268,000 in FY 2010), and reduce funding for juvenile probation and parole services ($1,317,380 each year). Sound, research-based intervention and diversion services provided by local juvenile probation offices can reduce recidivism and increase educational attainment.

Others will - or, it appears, may already have without prior General Assembly review - shut down existing juvenile programs that, while modest, have proven to be successful in giving troubled youth the opportunity to develop the life skills necessary to provide them with a realistic chance of achieving success in the job world and in society.

• The proposal would close Camp New Hope, a facility adjacent to Natural Bridge Juvenile Detention Center that as a former CCC camp provides outdoor skills to younger children from around the Commonwealth ($202,000 in FY 2009 and $248,000 in FY 2010). Since 1972, this facility has served approximately 46,000 visitors from correctional centers, court service units, local facilities, and community-based agencies working with Virginia youth.
• It has terminated the Beaumont Transitional Cottage Program, a Richmond area facility that promotes reentry for 18 year old offenders by providing opportunities for those deemed suitable to be separated from the "supermax" facilities in which they would otherwise be confined ($834,000 in both years).
• It would close the Chesapeake Community Placement Program, which provides mental health treatment for young offenders in need of it ($311,500 in FY 2009 and $623,000 in FY 2010).
• It has closed the Virginia Wilderness Institute, a 32 bed facility in southwest Virginia that also provides an alternative form of incarceration for boys from around the Commonwealth.
• Although not included in the December 2008 budget proposal, we also understand that local budget cuts may make it necessary to prepare a proposal to close the post-dispositional New Beginnings program at the Northern Virginia Juvenile Detention Center, which serves Alexandria, Arlington, and Falls Church. This is another successful program for those juveniles whose offenses are not serious and who are confined for no more than six months. The program provides a number of services to these offenders, permits them to be closer to their needed family support, and is a growing model whose effectiveness is well documented. Our judges rely on it as an alternative to commitment to prisons such as Beaumont.

Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse Services.

The budget proposal contemplates closing both the Southwestern Virginia Mental Health Institute's 15-bed adolescent unit, and the Commonwealth Center for Children and Adolescents in Staunton (a 48-bed facility that would be replaced with contracted beds in private hospitals). Since these are the only two public psychiatric inpatient beds for children and adolescents in Virginia, the proposal would have the effect of ending all such services. Unfortunately, private facilities simply do not accept many child and adolescent patients typically served at CCCA, because they are perceived as high risk.

* * * * * *

A budget is more than the admittedly challenging administrative exercise of balancing revenues and expenditures. As one former federal Budget Director noted long ago, more than any other document the budget sets our priorities in a way that crystallizes "the Presidential vision of national purpose."⁹ That is equally true at the state level. For this reason, we urge the General Assembly to reject the notion that we must make up our revenue shortfall by insisting that every agency of the Commonwealth simply "do its share." We must examine each program carefully, determine whether zeroing it out will result in diminished expenditures over the long term, and also look at whether there are more efficient ways of addressing our short term revenue shortfalls.

Nowhere is this more important than in considering expenditures in areas, like corrections policy, where our political process is hampered in ensuring that all voices are heard. Obviously, prisoners do not vote. Many of their families are not residents of the Commonwealth, and Virginia C.U.R.E. has found that many others are not familiar with the political process. It would thus be all too easy to look here for ways of balancing our budget. But the true measure of our Commonwealth will be how we treat "the least of these."¹⁰ As Justice Anthony Kennedy reminded the American Bar Association in his 2003 address, "We must try . . . to bridge the gap between proper skepticism about rehabilitation on the one hand and improper refusal to acknowledge that the more than two million inmates in the United States are human beings whose minds and spirits we must try to reach. . . . Out of sight, out of mind is an unacceptable excuse . . . "¹¹

We must of course, require our correctional agencies to do more with less. And we must continue to be tough on crime in Virginia. But there is a better way to satisfy both of these goals. In the words of Governor Strickland of Ohio, ". . . you don't have to be soft on crime to be smart in dealing with criminals."¹²

As the Pew Center study has recently documented, other states such as Texas, Kansas, and Nevada - faced with budget difficulties even before the onset of the current recession - have recently acted to create alternatives to long term incarceration that saved hundreds of millions of dollars while improving chances for effective reentry. These have included a number of programs similar to those in Virginia described above, such as greater use of community supervision for lower-risk offenders and expansion of drug treatment drug court initiatives. Governor Sibelius of Kansas has implemented a program designed to stem the automatic reincarceration of offenders for parole or probation violations (often for technical reasons such as failure to report change of address promptly), which account for roughly one-third and one-half, respectively, of all U.S. prison admissions. Nevada has expanded the use of earned sentence credits that are designed to increase incentives for rehabilitation and permit release of those who no longer pose a threat to society.¹³ In his report to the Hamilton Project last month, Professor Western has proposed a national prisoner reentry program that incorporates many of these same evidence-based practices in a cost-effective way.¹⁴

Putting such initiatives on the chopping block is penny wise, but pound foolish. So is reducing the capacity of the Virginia Parole Board to perform its statutory functions to make individualized assessments to determine whether the thousands of our prisoners incarcerated for at least 15 years now and eligible for parole are suitable for release. Indeed, at no more than 5%, our Parole Board currently appears to have the lowest grant rate of any comparable board in the United States, where the average is 33%.¹⁵ The Board has also consistently refused to grant virtually any petitions for geriatric release of those prisoners whose medical and other costs have skyrocketed, notwithstanding the implementation of this remedy many years ago in Section 53.1-40.01 of the Code. Virginia C.U.R.E. urges your committees not to reduce the resources of the Parole Board, and to direct the Governor to ensure that the Board's policies and procedures are consistent with its statutory mission. Since the cost of incarcerating parole-eligible inmates is well over $175 million each year,¹⁶ we can no longer afford to neglect this problem.

As Senator Webb has cautioned, "The conditions under which we actually remove human beings from society should be profound." But quite apart from the deprivation of their liberty and long term impact on their lives, "we are requiring the rest of our citizenry to spend precious tax dollars on building prisons for them, clothing them, feeding them, guarding them, and in some ways even entertaining them."¹⁷ Other states, and other Nations, have shown that they can do better. So can we.

Thank you for this opportunity to testify on this subject of such vital interest to Virginia C.U.R.E. and its members.