Prison overcrowding has been one of the city’s most pernicious problems for a couple of decades now. With a new crime plan in effect that promises to crack down on violent crime and round up parole and probation violators, there’s potential for that problem to get worse.
Late yesterday, the prisons commissioner and the mayor revealed a plan to ease overcrowding and focus on recidivism. The entire announcement can be found after the jump. You can also download a .pdf of the full report with this link.
In today’s Daily News, Catherine Lucey has a story about the plan which is response to factors that have been building for a long time but also to pressure recently put on in the form of a lawsuit:
Overcrowding is a key problem in the prison system. According to the plan, the current prison population is 9,193, though the city’s six jails were built for about 6,400. (A prison study commissioned in September said the population topped 9,300 inmates.)
Just last month 11 inmates filed a class-action lawsuit against the city and the prison commissioner, complaining of “triple-celling,” crowding three people into a two-person cell.
Though generally praised by a local prison advocacy group, that group is not without its questions:
William DiMascio, executive director of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, a prisoner advocacy group, praised the overall direction of the plan, but questioned the proposal to move some prisoners outside the city.
“We still have concerns regarding shipping prisoners out of jurisdictions where they will be further away from their families and will not have access to appropriate programs,” he said.
One of the causes of overpopulation is rooted in the continually dysfunctional relationship between the city and the state. From the report:
As of this writing over four-hundred inmates are serving state sentences of two to five or more years in PPS facilities. These inmates represent nearly 20% of the prisons sentenced population. Neither the prisons nor the City is reimbursed for costs associated with their care which is estimated at more than $11,000,000.00 annually. Removal of these inmates from PPS would result in a marked reduction in the Prisons budget, coupled with the availability of over four-hundred beds.
The report mentions that there is legislation pending in Harrisburg that would mandate that anyone serving over two years would do so in state custody. This is yet another example of the disadvantages faced by Philadelphia as the commonwealth’s largest and only “first class” city. The state continues to shirk a good deal of the responsibilities that it fulfills for other counties, especially when it comes to the law enforcement, the courts and the prisons.
Of course, the argument could be made that since these prisoners committed their crimes in Philadelphia or are Philadelphia residents, then the city should be made to foot the bill for their crimes rather than spread that cost on to the rest of the state. If that’s the case, perhaps all of the state tax money paid by Philadelphians and businesses in the city should also be kept in the city.
If Mayor Nutter can take steps to solve some of the issues between the city and the rest of the state, he will go a long way in being able to redirect funds towards investments in education, economic development, and city infrastructure while improving relations between the City of Brotherly love and its brothers and sisters in the rest of Pennsylvania.
Press release announcing prisons initiative is after the jump. Continue reading
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