• Tighten Virginia's Budget Wisely
• Try Less Costly Alternatives to Prison Expansion
• Use Savings for Education, Medicaid, Highways & Infrastructure

Despite tight budgets cutting education, healthcare, highways, and infrastructure, and with already high use of prisons, projections call for Virginia bypassing less costly alternatives in order to build more expensive, but likely less successful, prisons. This proposes a ten-year recess in prison building, and instead reduce Virginia's prison population (including from local jails) within three years to existing capacity, by implementing less costly, proven and promising non-prison alternatives –

• Accelerated parole of already eligible persons
• Non-Incarceration community treatment alternatives for non-violent offenders (residential treatment and drug court alternatives for non-violent drug offenders)
• Accelerated release for non-violent and elderly incarcerants
• Reduced incarceration for technical probation & parole violations, and
• Increased inside and post-release transition support

Under recent projections through 2013, Virginia's incarceration rate (490 per 100,000), already nearly 10 percent above the national average, means adding new prisons at nearly 3 times the national average. But new prisons are costly over the long term and starve other taxpayer priorities, with other vital Virginia programs paying for new prisons year in and year out for at least 30 years. Each new prison bed averages about $65,000 and costs about $25,000 a year to operate, meaning that every new 1000 bed Virginia prison will divert from state education, health care, transportation, and infrastructure about $30 million every year, costing taxpayers about $1 billion over its life. Virginia educators, health care administrators, and others can expect to forfeit to prisons an additional $12-$15 billion dollars just to house the projected growth in prison populations through 2013. However, evidence from other states identifies less costly yet more effective alternatives reducing crime, decreasing the need for ever more prisons and releasing $6 billion for other Virginia priorities or reducing Virginia household and business tax burdens. Superior alternatives primarily rely on intensive community based programs for non-violent offenders, particularly for substance-abuse treatment and drug courts, and for better pre-release treatment, transition preparation, and post-release support.1 For further information about superior alternative strategies to more prisons and the need to preserve funding for alternatives in Virginia, see Virginia C.U.R.E.'s written testimony addressing the Governor's proposed biennial budget filed January 9, 2009 accessible at www.vacure.org as position papers.