(Philadelphia Public Record, Apr. 30, 2009)

STARVING PAROLE COSTS $$$

by Tony West

City Council is starting to ask hard questions about Philadelphia’s chronically cash-starved probation and parole programs.

At a budget hearing yesterday on the Court system, Council Members tore into 1st Judicial Dist. budget bosses, who could not give much information about the way probation and parole are handled. Council Members made it clear this department may be able to turn the corner on both crime and cost overruns if only it is properly supported.

“Our Parole Officers make much less than surrounding jurisdictions,” Curtis Jones, Jr. insisted. “We’re down 40 Officers, yet we have a hiring freeze.

“But when a State Patrol Officer is sent to Philadelphia, he gets a $7,000 pay bump just for working in the city,” he noted. “Our pay scale makes no sense at all.”

Maria Quiñones Sánchez told 1st Dist. spokespersons their budget lacks transparency. “If they want us to give them more money, you’ll have to give us more information,” she said.

“Since probation saves so much money over incarceration,” said Blondell Reynolds Brown, “why not pursue aggressively letting nonviolent offenders out?”

Their position is in line with that taken by AFSCME Local 810, which represents Philadelphia’s Probation Officers.
“We can take 1,250 nonviolent sentenced offenders off of State Road and place them on probation or parole, by hiring only 11 new Officers,” asserted Local 810 President Louise Carpino before the hearing. “They should be placed in rehabilitation or reentry programs as a condition of parole.”

Carpino estimated total savings at a conservative $21 million a year. And that doesn’t include the benefits of nudging offenders into prosocial paths of life.

“Through simple rehabilitation programs, nonviolent offenders can become working taxpayers, who contribute to the City of Philadelphia by paying their bills, mortgages, debts and child support,” said Carpino.

Whenever concern about public safety spikes, a cry goes up for more funding for police and for prisons.

Yet the Philadelphia Adult Probation & Parole Dept. is the elephant in the bedroom of our criminal-justice system. Five-sixths of all offenders under court control in the county Prison System are actually on probation or parole at any given time – around 50,000 persons in all.

It is, however, an underfed elephant. Society spends approximately $35,000 to lock up an inmate for a year, but only $1,000 to supervise him in the community for the same amount of time. Put another way, the almost 10,000 offenders in the Prison System cost taxpayers $350 million a year while the 50,000 offenders in APPD cost taxpayers only $50 million a year….

Perhaps. In fact, it is unclear what the real costs of APPD are because, unlike the Prison System, it is administered by the 1st Judicial Dist. And Philadelphia’s Courts do not provide an itemized breakdown of costs for any of its operations. So the cost of supervising most of the offenders in Philadelphia is unknowable to the public.

Clearly, though, APPD is grossly underfunded by most professional measures. The 280 Probation Officers carry caseloads that average 175. And that’s if APPD survives the budget crisis without cutbacks.

Just as clearly, probation and parole that fail cost society dearly. More than half of all offenders are convicted of subsequent offenses. For the most part, this recidivism occurs while they are on probation or parole. That means another round of $35k/year incarceration, another harmful bump in the crime rate and another lost chance to change a life.

Probation and parole are inevitable facts of life. With just 5% of the world’s population, the United States already incarcerates 25% of the world’s prisoners, at a staggering cost. If probation and parole were eliminated, we would have to spend 10 times as much money as we now do on incarceration – $25 billion a year in Philadelphia alone.

Therefore, probation and parole are one of the few points in the criminal-justice system where a relatively small investment offers a chance to reduce both crime and overall spending.

By the same token, probationers and parolees who fail automatically create more pressure on police, prosecutors, courts, sheriffs and jailers. At the same time, each one that fails constitutes one less productive citizen.

APPD isn’t the only link in the criminal-justice system that seldom gets beefed up during crackdowns. The District Attorney’s Office is another. Currently DA Lynne Abraham has been asked by Mayor Michael Nutter to explore several budget options. Although no decision has been reached yet, the largest cut now under study would reduce the DA’s resources by 9.2% or $3 million. No one is currently studying an increase.

As a result, Carpino calculates, paroled offenders who slip often pay no penalty. “Police can make these new arrests because the arresting agency is properly funded. But the DA’s Office cannot process the corresponding uptick in cases in a timely manner. So 58% of arrests while on probation wind up being thrown out because of the 180-day rule (requiring cases to be brought to trial within that time after arrest).”

Offenders on probation quickly catch on to this math, Carpino said. “They’re playing a numbers game and they know it. So why don’t those in charge know it?”

In 2008, there were 74,000 unsolved thefts in Philadelphia. An unknown but large number of these may be attributed to individuals on probation or parole who are insufficiently supervised because of underfunding.

Under the present regime, Philadelphia Co. Parole Officers aren’t given many tools with which to supervise their clients. They never leave their offices in a 14-story building in Center City, to which parolees and probationers must report. Their ability to track their clients in the community, familiarize themselves with their behavior and address their needs is limited.

And Parole Officers aren’t rewarded for sticking at their mission and mastering it. Philadelphia Officers start at $39,000 but max out at $49,000 after seven years. In 2004 a national study found top pay for Philadelphia Parole Officers ranked ninth among the country’s 10 largest counties.

Unsurprisingly, Officers leave APPD. “Bucks Co. veterans make $19,000 more than Philadelphia Co. veterans,” Carpino said. “The State parole system has money, so they go there too. We suffer from a 40% turnover rate.”

“There are some extremely conscientious, dedicated and effective Parole Officers in Philadelphia despite that,” she continued. “But to a large extent, we function as a training ground for richer jurisdictions.”