The state is proceeding on two projects, a $400 million, 4,000-inmate facility at Graterford Prison in Montgomery County, and a $200 million, 2,000-inmate project in Centre County. As it so happens, that's also home to Penn State, which is scheduled to lose more than 50 percent of its Harrisburg appropriations.
Looking to Pennsylvania's future, we're spending more on warehousing criminals, 40 percent of whom are nonviolent offenders.
The commonwealth is so deeply invested in the inmate business that we export them to Michigan and Virginia, which have the room. But Corbett's budget plans for the return of the Michigan inmates by summer's end, just before school starts.
"We might all like the idea of being tough on crime, but it's extraordinarily expensive and counterproductive. Overall, crime has gone down since 1991, yet we incarcerate four times as many people," says John Roman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who teaches criminology at Penn. "Everyone now believes that increasing the length of sentences really has diminishing returns. People age out of crime. Your criminal offensing peaks in the late teens and early 20s and declines rapidly after that."
Older prisoners with longer sentences cost taxpayers far more - as much as $200,000 annually, compared with $32,000 for young offenders - while being of significantly less risk to citizens.
In the last two decades, the state's over-50 inmate population exploded from 370 to almost 8,000. Lifers constitute a tenth of the population, including inmates charged as juveniles yet ineligible for parole - an ignoble practice in which Pennsylvania leads the world.
Criminologists, armed with a battery of statistics and behavioral patterns, have become terribly smart about understanding and reducing crime. In New York state, crime and incarceration rates have notably decreased.
