Fla. shoots self in foot on prisons

Penny-wise and pound foolish might be an overused expression — OK, it overused. Even so, there’s no better description for cuts announced this week by the Florida Department of Corrections.

Ultimately, however, the blame rests with the Florida Legislature.

To cover a $50 million deficit in its health-care and pharmaceutical budgets, the state’s prison agency is slashing substance abuse, transitional housing and other re-entry programs. Peter, meet Paul.

Of course, the programs on the chopping block are all intended to help inmates who are released re-integrate successfully into their communities and steer clear of crime and return trips to prison. “You can’t just let people out of prison without some type of transition back into society,” state Sen. Jeff Brandes, the Legislature’s leading advocate for criminal-justice reform, told the News Service of Florida.

So the short-term savings will likely lead to higher expenses over the long term from increased crime and a larger inmate population. That makes the cuts a double-whammy to public safety and taxpayers’ wallets.

Currently taxpayers are spending $2.4 billion a year on the state Corrections Department. It oversees an inmate population of about 96,000, which is higher than the national average per capita.

Corrections Secretary Julie Jones, who might just have the worst job in Tallahassee, noted that her department has a constitutional responsibility to provide an “adequate and appropriate” level of health care to inmates. With funding depleted in that category, and no slack elsewhere in its budget, the agency had little choice but to target other accounts for cuts.

Gov. Rick Scott’s office pointed out that the state House and Senate didn’t follow his recommendation for a $169 million spending increase for the department. So the buck on the budget stops with legislators, who couldn’t scrape up sufficient funding for Corrections even as they increased overall state spending.

But the key to solving chronic financial problems at the state’s prison agency goes beyond shoveling enough dollars into its maw once a year. There alternatives: Georgia, Texas, Louisiana and other red states have shown it’s possible to save taxpayers big money on corrections by warehousing fewer nonviolent criminals behind bars.

Florida still insists on doing the opposite. In 2015, 72 percent of people admitted to prisons in the Sunshine State were incarcerated for nonviolent crimes. Hard-core sentencing policies such as mandatory minimums keep many of the state’s inmates locked up longer than their crimes or public safety would warrant.

Brandes, a St. Petersburg Republican, and other legislative advocates of criminal-justice reform, including Democratic state Sen. Randolph Bracy of Orlando, tried and failed this year to win passage for several measures that would have gradually reduced the number of nonviolent offenders in prison. The list included bills to relax mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent offenders and to raise the monetary threshold for thefts considered felonies from $300 to $1,500, which would have been the first increase in more than three decades.

Brandes and other criminal-justice reform advocates have been pushing these measures for years. They’ve run into resistance from legislators who are too timid to embrace smarter approaches to sentencing for fear of appearing soft on crime.

As budget problems persist in Florida’s prison system, and the list of states succeeding with reform grows, this is an increasingly irresponsible and indefensible position.

Savings from cuts to inmate re-entry programs will lead to higher long-term costs.

Legislators should follow other states in incarcerating fewer nonviolent offenders.