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Advocates tell commission Massachusetts spends more on corrections even as population falls
Summary
Prisoners Legal Services told the special commission that inmate counts have fallen substantially while staffing and facility costs have risen; advocates blamed overclassification, expanded restrictive housing and underused minimum-security and prerelease capacity for higher costs.
Prisoners Legal Services (PLS) told the Special Commission on Correctional Consolidation and Collaboration that Massachusetts has seen a sharp drop in its incarcerated population while per-person correctional spending has risen.
"The count is down by somewhere between 25 to 30% over the past couple years," said Dave Greenie, executive director of Prisoners Legal Services, adding that longer-range data show declines closer to 48 percent. But he said the state's corrections spending and staffing levels have not fallen in parallel and in some places have increased.
Greenie urged the commission to focus on operational drivers of cost, not only the raw population. He pointed to widespread discretionary overrides of objective classification scores, which keep many people in medium or maximum-security placements even when they're technically scored for lower-security housing, and to expanding use of behavioral assessment units (BAUs). "If we're overusing tools like segregated housing and not using minimum-security or step-down facilities, we spend more to achieve worse outcomes," he said.
PLS presented cost comparisons showing ordinary medium- and maximum-security housing far cheaper than hospital-level placements; Greenie said a hospital-level placement such as Shattuck can cost roughly $600,000 a year for one person. He and other witnesses argued that better use of minimum-security placements, more consistent step-downs before release and standardized medical and substance-use treatment could reduce fixed costs and improve reentry outcomes.
Sheriffs and other panelists said some of the cost increases reflect changes in the population being held: a smaller cohort now in custody is, on average, older and more medically or behaviorally complex, requiring higher staff ratios and more intensive care. "Chronic mental health, substance use and chronic health care issues should not be in jail," a sheriff said, while also noting that judges and statutes limit when particular individuals can be removed from custody.
PLS closed by urging the commission to pursue targeted reforms: reduce inappropriate overrides, expand use of underutilized minimum-security beds and prerelease programs, and standardize medical care across facilities to capture volume-based savings for pharmaceuticals and treatments. The commission took testimony and asked for documentary data on classification overrides, length-of-stay in BAUs, and per-site program participation rates to assess the claims further.
The commission voted earlier in the session to approve the minutes from the prior meeting.
