Crime down, spending on prisons up in Connecticut

Connecticut prison populations are at their lowest in 30 years, but the DOC budget is rising.

Guards change shifts at the entrance to Northern Correctional Institution in Somers on Feb. 22, 2001. (STEVE MILLER / AP)

Despite the number of inmates in Connecticut prisons having steadily dropped since 2008 -- now at its lowest point in 30 years -- the state’s budget for the Department of Correction (DOC) continues to rise, seeing an almost 11 percent increase since last year, according to the state’s open checkbook website.

The United States as a whole spends billions of dollars every year on incarceration -- an estimated $182 billion, according to a report by the Prison Policy Initiative.

Connecticut is ninth in the country in corrections spending per capita, according to data gathered through public records.

This spending is statistically disproportionate to key measurements of crime in the state, such as crime rate, total arrests, and incarceration rate. Both the crime rate and total arrests in Connecticut have dropped 33 percent from 2008 to 2018, according to annual crime reports conducted by the state.

Connecticut also has the 20th lowest corrections population -- which includes community inmates such as parolees and people on probation -- in the country. The state also has the 21st lowest incarceration rate, that is, the number of people imprisoned per 100,000 people, according to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The state’s budget for the DOC has remained relatively steady since 2008, aside from two notable spikes.

The first was in 2012 when the budget saw a 21 percent increase from 2011, a difference of about $142.5 million. The second spike was this year when the budget increased by nearly 11 percent, or about $80.5 million. Overall, the budget for the DOC has ballooned by $165 million since 2008.

Oddly enough, these major increases seemingly have no correlation with the crime rate, the number of total arrests, or even how many inmates are in state prisons.

You would think 2011 was absolute bedlam to justify a 21 percent increase in spending on corrections in 2012, but total arrests actually dropped by 4,397 arrests between 2011 and 2012. The crime rate remained virtually unchanged with a 0.22 percent decrease.

There hasn’t been a year since 2008 where the crime rate index -- which tracks murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft-- hasn’t been lower than the previous year.

Connecticut’s crime index rate is also well below the national rate. Total arrests have steadily dropped within that same span, besides for very slight upticks in 2016 and 2017 (less than a percent each year) before dropping 3.5 percent in 2018.

From Tough on Crime to criminal justice reform in Connecticut

In 1979, Connecticut’s prison population began to skyrocket. From 1979 to 2003, the state’s prison population grew from 3,594 inmates to 19,121 inmates--a 432 percent increase, according to Connecticut DOC data.

During those years, two major so-called “tough on crime” legislations were passed. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act signed by President Reagan in 1986, which established mandatory minimum sentencing, and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act signed by President Clinton in 1994.

Additionally, several states enacted “three-strikes” laws that enhanced sentencing for repeat offenders. These legislations served as the main catalysts for the dramatic spike in the incarceration rates across the country, not only due to the harsher sentencing laws, but also the cutback in parole releases.

“Parole eligibility rates changed as well, whereas parole-eligible inmates had been required to serve 50 percent of their sentence, new classifications meant that those convicted of violent crimes now had to serve 85 percent of their sentence. The so-called “truth in sentencing” enactment was part of the tough on crime movement,” Andrew Clark, the Director of the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy (IMRP) at Central Connecticut State University, said.

“So, not only were sentence lengths correspondingly longer during this time period, you had to serve more of them, and so that exacerbated a situation whereby the DOC and the justice system couldn't necessarily respond other than by building beds or sending people out of state.”

In 2004, with Connecticut prisons overcrowded by as much as 2,000 people and the state’s prison population continuing its upward trend, the Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center worked with Connecticut policymakers to reform the criminal justice system with the aim of reducing corrections spending while increasing public safety.

The resulting legislation was the nation’s first justice reinvestment initiative.

“The concept of that,” Clark, who worked on the initiative as a member of the General Assembly, said, “was that you could cut down on the most expensive parts of the system, corrections being one of them, and then re-invest in people, in places where they're coming from and going to, so you can cut the cycle of recidivism, get greater public safety and hopefully overall shrink the system and put state resources to more proactive things.”

The initiative established programs designed to cut the number of people incarcerated due to technical violations of parole or probation, such as missing curfew, lack of unemployment or attendance at school. It also mandated that parole hearings be held in a timely manner and required the state to create a comprehensive re-entry strategy to help formerly incarcerated individuals transition back into society successfully.

The Connecticut Reentry Collaborative launched its re-entry strategy in 2018.

While the initiative did succeed in cutting the prison and parole populations significantly and lowering recidivism, 16 years later, it has not had the desired effect on the state’s corrections spending.

The hidden costs of the Department of Correction

Though the state’s budget appropriations for its various agencies are a matter of public record, simply viewing the state’s yearly budget report doesn’t give the full picture of an agency's costs.

Beyond the money for an agency’s yearly payroll and operating costs lie hidden costs like fringe benefits that, while they are accounted for by the state, end up in the Comptroller’s budget rather than the agency’s budget.

“The state is required to pay for fringes, however, like most state agency budgets, those fringes are put over into the Comptroller’s budget,” Clark, who also worked on the state’s Appropriations Committee, said. “As opposed to higher education, because higher education has a different revenue pool, they can also get tuition and whatnot. They get to fridge waivers for a percentage of their population, that is not the case with 90 whatever percent of state agencies, including DOC, so that number you see there is actually substantially less than what the actual payment is or the budget is for that agency.”

According to Clark, the amount the state usually pays toward fringes is roughly 98 percent of the employee’s salary if they have a family on their medical plan. Due to the hazardous nature of their work, DOC employees’ fringe rate is around 120 percent of their salary. The DOC has the most employees out of any state agency, besides the University of Connecticut, with 6,721 and a total payroll of about $469 million for 2020.

That means, if calculating the fringe rate at 120 percent of the DOC’s payroll, the state is spending roughly an additional $563 million dollars on the DOC that isn’t accounted for in the agency’s budget.

And, according to Clark, fringe costs aren’t the only agency expenses absent from the DOC’s budget.

“The other thing is facility costs, like bonding and things like that. The state spent over a billion dollars to create facilities for DOC in the 90s, and those costs would be over in the bond budget, they wouldn't be in the agency budget,” Clark said. “So, those are things where if you look at particular agencies, some have more infrastructure needs than others, and so, if you think about DOC, more than others, they're 24/7 operations.”

“We need to start looking towards reinvesting in communities”

This year, Connecticut’s budget for the DOC was roughly $827 million, an increase of almost $81 million over the previous year.

It’s also worth noting that the state has paid out over $82 million in overtime wages to DOC employees this year, according to the state’s open payroll website. The state pays more overtime wages to DOC personnel than any other state government agency by about $33 million.

In fact, without factoring in Mental Health and Addiction Services and the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, Connecticut pays out more in overtime wages to the DOC than every other state agency combined.

Claudine Fox, the campaign manager of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Connecticut, says it's time to start using these funds to help struggling communities, especially the black and brown communities that are disproportionately policed and imprisoned.

“It's clear, especially if we're talking about the connection between the spending and the actual prison population that exists in Connecticut right now, we need to start looking towards reinvesting in communities, in the communities that are most impacted by the system of DOC,” Fox said.

“We want to focus on the systems and systems of oppression that put people in positions to commit crimes of opportunity, so to speak. And then we also don't talk about what happens after people exit the facility.”

Last year, the Council on the Collateral Consequences of a Criminal Record was created after a study found that people with criminal records in Connecticut face over 500 barriers to successfully reentering society and living happy, healthy lives, according to a report by the CT Mirror.

The Governor's Office did not respond to a request to comment for this story.