By John Cheves
The Lexington Herald-Leader
FRANKFORT, Ken. — Kentucky would keep packing felons into its prisons and jails, and the Corrections Department would suck money from the rest of the justice system — including Kentucky State Police, prosecutors and public defenders — in Gov. Steve Beshear’s two-year budget proposal.
The state expects to incarcerate about 24,000 felons by fiscal 2010, up from about 22,500 today.
To help with this load, Beshear would expand the medium-security Little Sandy Correctional Complex in Elliott County by 816 beds, using $39 million in bond funds.
He would stick 500 more felons in county jails, many of which already are overcrowded with state inmates, and he would put hundreds more in private prisons or let them serve time at home, electronically monitored.
Beshear conceded that his proposal would further strain county jails, from whom he’s cutting $2 million in the state’s $16 million in annual support. But he has no choice, he said.
“We don’t have any control over the number of people right now that the justice system is putting in our prisons,” Beshear told reporters. “Once they’re there, we’ve got to feed them.”
Beshear said he will create a criminal justice task force, with representatives from the justice system, to review the state’s penal code and sentencing guidelines and to suggest reforms that could ease demand for prison cells without risking public safety. The current system is broken, he said.
“During the past 30 years, Kentucky’s crime rate has remained virtually flat, increasing only about 3 percent,” he said in his budget address. “But our incarceration rate has increased by 600 percent in the same time frame.”
It would not be the first committee convened for such a purpose. Most recently, in 2005, Chief Justice Joseph Lambert and then-Lt. Gov. Steve Pence created the Blue Ribbon Sentencing Commission. That panel fell apart when prosecutors and police attended in large numbers and stuck to a hard line against most reforms, said member Robert Lawson, a criminal law professor at the University of Kentucky.
“It just went up in smoke,” Lawson said.
The Corrections Department budget is expected to swell from its current $417 million to $478 million in 2010. Beshear would compensate by trimming state funds for commonwealth’s attorneys, county attorneys and public defenders at the Department of Public Advocacy. The DPA’s request for $2.3 million a year for social workers, to guide its clients to addiction and mental-health treatment, was denied.
Kentucky State Police would take a harder punch, dropping from its current $157 million to $150 million in 2009 and $153 million in 2010.
Copyright 2008 Lexington Herald-Leader