PA’s corrections system headed in the right direction
Capitolwire: PA’s corrections system headed in the right direction, but more work is needed, says Acting Sec. Wetzel.
By Chris Comisac
Bureau Chief
Capitolwire
HARRISBURG (March 18) – Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration may not have much good to say about Gov. Tom Corbett’s four years in office.
However the administration’s decision to keep John Wetzel as secretary of the state Corrections Department spoke volumes about the efforts of the last few years to completely rework Pennsylvania’s corrections system.
Acting Secretary Wetzel said he and his department will continue to build on the successes of the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI) pieces already implemented by his agency as well as the Board of Probation and Parole.
“In the 24 years before the last administration, so up to 2010, we saw, on average, prison growth of about 1,500 inmates a year,” said Wetzel during his department’s budget hearing before the House Appropriations Committee Wednesday. “During the past four years, we actually saw a reduction over that time of about 400 inmates, which in the context of a 51,000-inmate population [is] not a huge percentage.”
He noted the 400-inmate figure is closer to 600 because the state is now housing 200 inmates from Northumberland County following a fire that destroyed the county jail.
“What is huge is that we’ve been able to essentially flatten out the population growth, and that’s in large part due to Senate Bill 100,” Wetzel said, referring to the Justice Reinvestment Initiative enabling legislation.
John R. Tuttle, the Acting Chairman for the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole, added: “Pre-JRI projections had about 56,000 [inmates] for John’s prisons, so for us to have stemmed the tide and turned it back in another direction – we’re on the right track.”
The department ended the calendar year with 50,756 offenders, which Wetzel said cost approximately $38,000 per inmate to house.
Both Wetzel and Tuttle spoke about their efforts to focus improving internal efficiencies, reforming their approach, practices, and processes.
Both men explained the two agencies have been able to reduce their backlog in the parole process, which enables more offenders to meet the parole board, to have their cases reviewed, and, when appropriate, to be subsequently released in a timely manner.
The length of incarceration time has been reduced for parole violators, said Tuttle, from what was an average 12 to 14 months to a maximum – due to a cap imposed by the JRI law – of six months for an initial parole violation, with nine- and 12-month options for multiple violations.
“In Fiscal Year 2005-06, we were returning technical parole violators at the rate of 1.47 percent of our population,” said Tuttle. “Right now, we’ve dropped that to about 0.97, or about a 33 percent decrease in the returns of technical parole violators since that time.”
Wetzel, however, acknowledged the expectations of savings from the JRI have not materialized as its proponents had anticipated, despite inmate reductions, which totaled 756 last year.
“The cost nut is a bigger nut to crack than the population,” Wetzel said, responding to a question about JRI savings.
“When you look at the infrastructure costs of 26 prisons and 15,000 staff members, frankly a 756-inmate reduction does not result in those significant savings we want to see,” he said.
But he said one of the big contributors to the 756-inmate drop was due in large part to his department experiencing its lowest number of court commitments in seven years, with a total of 10,321 commitments in 2014 compared with 11,520 commitments in 2013.
“That suggests that if we can find a way to do things” at the front end at the county level – such as addiction treatment and other ways to divert offenders from state prison – “it’s really there that we could get a huge return on our investment,” said Wetzel.
Wetzel added there’s still more to be done, with much of it being an effort to “make sure the people we put in state prison are those who need to be in a state prison to ensure public safety,” pointing to a need for lawmakers to review how the state handles non-violent offenders. He said many states have gone the route of managing their non-violent offenders in the community.
Community corrections options have gotten a boost from the JRI, said Wetzel: “It really gave us the ability to restructure the community corrections system, in particular.”
Using that ability, he said the department has made re-entry into the community a focus, ensuring the barriers to an inmate’s re-entry in the community are addressed before the individual is released – all so there is less likelihood those individuals come back to the corrections system.
“We’ve really made a pivot, as a system, to focus on outcomes,” said Wetzel, explaining the department’s contracts for its community-based effort – which he said is “really focused on halfway houses” since about half of the state’s offenders go through them – are all performance based, basing compensation on reduction of the recidivism rate of former inmates.
“We saw in the first marking period an actual reduction in the recidivism of offenders that go back through the center [halfway house],” said Wetzel.
“We’re the first, and currently the only, state in the nation to do that,” he said, noting that many other states are looking to replicate Pennsylvania’s policy.
Wetzel also talked about the major effort the department has been making to improve the treatment of offenders with mental health problems. He explained that 24 percent of the department’s inmate population is mentally ill, with eight percent “seriously mentally ill.”
Responding to a question about correction staff safety, Wetzel said the number of assaults on prison corrections officers and the number of inmate-on-inmate assaults both increased during the past year, and that was likely due to new policies that “nearly quadrupled” mentally ill offenders’ out-of-cell time – he said more than half of both type of assault were by mentally ill offenders. That policy was part of a settlement agreement with the Disability Rights Network which sued the state in federal court, as well as the outcome of a U.S. Justice Department investigation, regarding the state Corrections Department’s treatment of mentally ill offenders.
“We’re put a big emphasis on training correctional officer staff in ‘mental health first aid,’ which is a newer training – it’s an eight-hour training – and made the commitment to train all 15,000 of our employees … and we’re at 92 percent, and that started last March, and that should be completed by the end of this year,” said Wetzel, indicating his anticipation the new ways to handle mentally ill offenders will produce “better outcomes.”
The department is also using new specialized units to address the different treatment needs of mentally ill offenders, including Secure Residential Treatment Units (SRTUs), Behavior Management Units (BMUs), Residential Treatment Units (RTUs), and Diversionary Treatment Units (DTUs), said Wetzel.
“The combination of those two factors, we hope, will level that out,” he said, referring to officer and inmate safety, while enhancing the treatment and care of those offenders.
Tuttle and Wetzel also responded to questions about the proposed consolidation of the Corrections Department and the Pennsylvania Board of Probation and Parole.
“We look forward to making out agencies stronger,” said Tuttle.
“We’ve come a significant way in working together, but any time you have two agencies managing the same people there’s just some inherent inefficiencies in that, and also some communication stuff,” Wetzel said. “So that’s really what we’re hoping to attain and improve, and do it in a manner that is a deliberate, planned process that involves both agencies as equal partners, really looking at how we can develop a corrections system that makes sense at every step.”
As for the department’s budget requests, Wetzel said his agency is requesting $146.5 million in state funds – a 6.93-percent increase – with nearly 84.6 percent of the requested increased due to personnel costs, which are being driven in large part by pension contributions.
He added the department is seeking a $56 million supplemental increase for the current fiscal year, which he said are due to costs associated with the recently approved H1 labor agreement – with the Pennsylvania State Corrections Officers Association – and higher than anticipated overtime costs resulting from over 1,500 departmental vacancies that have to be covered by existing employees.
The probation and parole board is seeking a $13 million increase over the current year’s $195 million appropriated for not only the board’s general operations but also funding for the Sexual Offenders Assessment Board, the county probation Grant-in-Aid program, the Firearms Education and Training Commission, the Office of Victim Advocate and state and federal augmentations, said Tuttle.
Robert Storm
Eastern Region Vice President
www.pscoa.org