(Philadelphia Public Record, May 28, 2009)

RURAL PA. SCORES OFF OUR FELONS

by Tony West

It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. High rates of urban crime are an ill wind indeed – but not, perhaps, if you live in Frackville, Schuylkill Co.; Smithfield, Huntingdon Co.; or Houtzdale, Clearfield Co. For these and many other depressed upstate Pennsylvania communities, where employment in mills, mines and forestry has been declining for a generation, Philadelphia crime is a windfall – the only new game in town.

More than 15,000 Philadelphia prisoners are serving their time in 27 Pennsylvania Dept. of Corrections prisons, none of which are in Philadelphia Co. Housing, guarding and caring for them costs Pennsylvania taxpayers almost $500 million a year.

The bulk of this money is dropped into stagnant rural and small-town economies in the state’s mountainous interior. An important chunk is also repatriated to the headquarters of private firms that specialize in prison contracts.

Over the last 30 years, a wave of get-tough sentiment has led to an explosion in the Pennsylvania prison population. Stricter sentencing guidelines, minimum sentences and added penalties for many drug and gun violators have vastly increased the number of offenders serving terms of two years or longer, the figure needed to bump them up out of county jails into the State Prison System. In 1979, there were only 8,000 State inmates in 10 institutions. Today there are upwards of 49,000 people incarcerated in 27 State facilities and new prisons are on the drawing board. (About 15,000 other persons are locked up in county prison systems.)

Roughly speaking, every three prison inmates generate one civil-service job in the DOC and one additional job in the surrounding economy. So 15,000 Philadelphians in upstate slammers generate 10,000 jobs for upstate Pennsylvanians.

The total State Prison budget is $1.64 billion and it has been steadily rising for many years, with little of the public clamor for restraint that other government budgets face. That’s a lot of money to be gone after, and politicians have done just that. General Assembly legislators in depressed areas lobby hard to bring prisons to their communities.

But this way of planning Pennsylvania’s prisons leads to large conflicts of interest. Rural legislators develop a vested interest in keeping prison populations high, not in reducing big-city crime. In fact, the more prisoners they can extract from Philadelphia, the more they gain.

Therefore, rural legislators have every reason to support longer-sentencing and mandatory-sentencing crackdowns, especially if they apply to crimes that disproportionately affect Philadelphia. It’s not their constituents, for the most part, that are being locked up and removed from their home-town economy.

By the same token, these legislators win no local economic advantage if Pennsylvania invests in more and better parole programs, which might reduce the prison population immediately and lessen recidivism in the long run.

First, if an offender in prison gets a dollar spent on him, on parole he’s only worth a dime. The fact he is cheaper to maintain is a blessing for taxpayers in general, but a loss to marketers of prison products. Secondly, Philadelphia offenders can be exported to bolster rural economies only if they are incarcerated. If they are paroled instead, they’ll stay in Philadelphia – as will both that dime of the parole budget, and the jobs and revenues that parolees generate by working.

And for a legislator with a lucrative prison in a low-crime District, recidivism, sadly, pays as long as that prison’s inmates do their backsliding in someone else’s District. For them, it just means repeat customers. These lawmakers may rise above commercial concerns, but they have no economic incentive to do so. Punishing, not reducing, crime is what pays their voters most.

There’s an even more-direct payoff for rural legislators to snag city prisoners. Inmates count as “residents” in the US Census for apportionment and for State and Federal grants to local governments – but they can’t vote! A prisoner makes a dream constituent: one who keeps your District from shrinking and helps you bring home all sorts of public largesse for your supporters – but who can’t threaten your seat or demand any services from you.

That role is typically borne by Philadelphia legislators such as State Rep. Vanessa Lowery Brown. “It’s a triple threat to our District”, she says. “We lose human, economic and governmental resources. But I’m still their State Rep. When they’re in trouble, they call home and that means they call me.”

Rural legislators are bipartisan in their enthusiasm for prisons. Influential Democratic State Rep. Bill DeWeese recently landed a new DOC facility for his hard-scrabble coal District in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

But State public-safety budgets are ultimately decided by agreement between House and Senate. And there is no getting around the 30-20 Republican domination of the Senate. Republican Senate Districts are built with chunks of rural real estate that were shrewdly apportioned in 2001. It should surprise no one that of DOC’s 27 prisons, 21 are in Republican Senate Districts.

The Prison-Industrial Complex

Something is rotten about the process that has driven Pennsylvania to rely on ever-increasing incarceration as the only response to crime, says Angus Love. He is executive director of the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project, with a 25-year track record in prison law. PILP is a nonprofit that works to ensure equal access to justice for indigent institutionalized persons.

“Across the country, most states are recognizing the costs of an ever-expanding prison system and cutting back,” he asserts. “But Pennsylvania is not. It’s going in the other direction.”

Vested interests in the prison business begin with architects and contractors who build them, he says. They go further to include providers of food, such as ARAMark and Marriott; providers of health care; and providers of many other services, such as communications.

“When telecoms were deregulated in 1996, the Feds missed the fact prisons were a natural monopoly,” Love notes. “Companies like ATT and Verizon were allowed to negotiate cost-plus contracts, to get their share of the 2 million collect calls a year from prison.” These are just about the last expensive phone calls on the planet.

Pennsylvania’s scanty conflict-of-interest laws make it easy for legislators to profit directly from pro-prison lawmaking, Love charges. “John Perzel was getting paid $78,000 a year for being a State Representative,” he notes; “at the same time, he was being paid $156,000 a year to sit on the Board of Directors of the Geo Group, which had the management contract for Delaware Co. Prison. While Perzel was being paid to incarcerate people, he was also writing legislation to incarcerate them.”

Last year Perzel introduced legislation, which has returned this year as HB 35, that would eliminate parole for any violent offender convicted of rape, robbery, murder, aggravated assault, or any gun crime. It would make gun sentences be served consecutively. And it would require five Parole Board members, not two, to approve an inmate’s parole. If enacted, these actions would make it much harder to get out of prison.

To be fair, though, they would no longer directly benefit Perzel’s company. Geo Group lost the contract for the Delaware Co. jail after a string of life-threatening scandals and lawsuits that turned Pennsylvania’s largest experiment in for-profit prisons into a money-loser.