By Bill Davis, senior editor | South Carolina will soon find itself spending more general tax dollars on those who are incarcerated than it does on college students, if ongoing trends don’t reverse or change direction.
Consider that in the 2004-05 fiscal year, the state allotted $362 million in General Fund dollars for prisons, which included the Departments of Corrections and the agencies that deals with juveniles, probation and parole, according to state documents.
But in the current fiscal year budget, that amount has grown to $507 million. That’s a nearly 40 percent increase in a little over a decade, even as the inmate population dropped by 2,000, or about 10 percent, between 2005 and 2015, according to Department of Corrections numbers.
By contrast, higher education has seen its General Fund base-funding drop from $708 million in 2004-05 to $662 million in the current fiscal year budget. That’s a reduction of $46 million.
Prisons have certainly done better than colleges since the Great Recession, according to state budget documents. In the fiscal 2007-08 before the economic downturn, higher education and corrections/public safety accounted for 13 percent and 9 percent, respectively, of the state’s General Fund budget.
In the current fiscal year, the prisons group has held its ground, percentage-wise at 9 percent. But higher education has slipped from 13 percent to just 8 percent, a reduction in more than $300 million in General Fund dollars.
Julie Carullo, director of external affairs for the state Commission on Higher Education, said understanding the differences in the agencies’ budgets could depend on which set of numbers were being considered.
Carullo said some calculations include scholarship money, which is not used by the commission. It oversees institutions from technical schools to four-year land grant institutions.
Senate Education Chair John Courson (R-Columbia) said this week that the changes in funding levels for the two groups did not show a bias in favor of spending on prisons. But rather, he said, it reflected an ongoing under-funding of higher education by the General Assembly.
Courson said the Senate has tried to put more money into higher education in recent years, but that amount has been beat back by the House versions of the state budget in recent years.
Senate Corrections and Penology Committee Chair Mike Fair (R-Greenville) agreed. He added the state was currently spending more on its prisons system, in part, due to a lawsuit, which has led to the hiring of 40 medical and mental health professionals.
Fair praised the current Corrections administration, saying, “gone are the days of deficit spending” under the administration of Gov. Mark Sanford.
But Fair said, more funding was needed in prisons to make facilities safer. He pointed to one facility, which has 120 men stored overnight in a dormitory and has only a single female guard at night.
To keep costs down, Fair said South Carolina was in step with the rest of the nation, which is looking more to a wider variety of punishments than just incarceration.
Giving judges more “tools” with which to deal with offenders, especially younger and non-violent ones, can turn lives around and save taxpayers serious money, said Fair.
One of his favorite examples is a work camp in Beaufort where younger offenders are diverted into a program that teaches them how to weld in a relatively short amount of time and emerge with skills for a $20-an-hour job.
More cost-savings could be realized if the state put more money into parole and probation programs, said state Sen. Gerald Malloy (D-Darlington), standing in the Statehouse next to Bryan Stirling, the executive director of the Department of Corrections.
Stirling said that thanks to relatively new alternative sentencing programs ushered in by an omnibus sentencing reform bill that Malloy helped push through a few years ago, his agency was able to close “three and a half prisons” and reap cost savings. Malloy credited Stirling with reducing the state’s prison populations by close to 5,000 inmates in recent years.
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