When making the case for new funding for a program, policy, or service that targets people released from prison or jail, state and local government officials, in addition to advocates, typically predict that the initiative will reduce recidivism, often basing their hypotheses on studies showing that similar initiatives in other jurisdictions have demonstrated such an impact. The corresponding decline in the prison or jail population, their argument goes, will generate far more in savings than the actual cost of the new initiative.

While many policymakers will find this line of thinking compelling, most return to the fiscal realities they currently face: there is little or no money available for new initiatives, regardless of the savings they may generate years down the road. In fact, policymakers are often proposing cuts to current budgets, which often force agency officials to scale back or shut down altogether existing programs and services that have demonstrated a positive, and measurable, impact.

Budget problems in many jurisdictions have become so acute that elected officials are even slashing the budgets of departments of correctionsêþ"agencies once thought to be recession-proof. As noted in the Introduction to this Report, the only way to enable corrections administrators to cut costs significantly is to reduce the prison population, or at least to manage its rate of growth. Such shifts in policy carry obvious political risks, and if done hastily can unleash a firestorm of public criticism. Nevertheless, if implemented carefully and thoughtfully, they can have the backing of the public and the potential to increase public safety. The chart below further illustrates how these policies might be enacted and how the savings they generate may be quantified.

Changes to policies that govern prison admissions and length of stay can in fact quickly create a major stream of revenue to fund many of the policy statements described in this Report. In doing so, policymakers can effectively argue that they are increasing public safety by strengthening and making community supervision more effective and ensuring substance abuse treatment is available for drug-addicted prisoners released from a correctional facility. Seizing some of these funds for such initiatives, however, will be tricky. Policymakers are likely to be eyeing any savings generated as funding for the highest fiscal priorities of the state or county, such as closing a budget shortfall or highway repairs. These priorities may bear no direct relationship to corrections, criminal justice generally, or the communities hit hardest by prisoner re-entry.

That said, the steps policymakers are taking to generate the savings in the first place--returning people to the community from prison at an accelerated rate and discouraging their reincarceration--provide two powerful political imperatives for reinvesting at least a portion of the savings generated in the communities disproportionately affected by this issue. First, without an infusion of resources into community supervision agencies, along with treatment, supports, and services upon which many returning prisoners' success depends; policymakers run the risk of trading short-term savings for increased instability--including the possibility of higher crime rates--in poor urban areas. Second, there should be an expectation among community residents that at least some of the millions of dollars once invested in the incarceration of their neighbors and family members will be reinvested in their efforts to absorb these people back into their communities.

Example: Building Bridges from Conviction to Employment (CT)

In the summer of 2003, members of the General Assembly faced a budget shortfall of over $250 million, a steadily growing inmate population, and pressure from the governor to appropriate funds to send additional inmates out of state to ease crowding in the state's prisons. The General Assembly commissioned a study describing various options to contain the growth of the prison population and the cost savings each of these measures would generate. In May 2004, the General Assembly passed legislation, nearly unanimously (which the governor subsequently signed into law) enacting several of these and other recommendations, which, among other things, aimed to reduce the number of people returned to prison for technical violations of parole and probation. Leaders in the Assembly anticipated that the implementation of these measures would make the transfer of more inmates out of state unnecessary. Of the $60 million allocated for the anticipated contract to send inmates out of state, the majority of these funds was returned to the general fund, helping to close the budget shortfall; $16 million was redirected to fund additional probation and parole officers, halfway houses, and the New Haven Community Foundation, charged with establishing a pilot project to assist a handful of neighborhoods expanding their capacity to receive people released from prison and jail.