Why is it important?

Oregon invests nearly all of its General Fund dollars to do three things:  educate, medicate and incarcerate Oregonians.  Our spending on incarceration is significantly higher than the national average both in total spending as a share of our state budget and in costs/inmate.  Driven by ballot measure mandated minimum sentences and high employee costs, this spending is delivering diminishing returns for public safety and is preventing greater investment in education. 
 

 What we need to do

The Oregon Business Plan Supports the Public Safety Commission's vision:
 

• The inmate population should be stabilized, using existing prisons for Oregon's most dangerous, high-risk offenders, and investing in evidenced-based public safety programs with a higher benefit-cost ratio than incareration.

 

• Policymakers should bring Oregon's cost per inmate in line with national norms.  The Commission shows Oregon spent 7.4 percent more than the U.S. average.  Much of that difference is driven by compensation per correctional officer, which is also above the U.S. average.   

Background

Incarceration rates have been rising significantly since voters approved Ballot Measure 11 in 1994. The measure created mandatory minimum sentences for 16 crimes. During the subsequent decade, the inmate population doubled from 6,000 to 12,000. Today it’s at 14,000 and headed to 16,000 by 2020.

The impacts of Measure 11 extend to the number of adults in county jails and on probation or parole. In total, 1 in 33 Oregon adults is under correctional control – up from 1 in 74 in 1982.

Prison expansion has been accompanied by a sharp reduction in crime. In Portland, the rate of violent crime stood at 24 per 1,000 population in 1985. By 2007, it was only 6 per 1,000. Nationally, experts estimate that prison expansions explained about a quarter of the decline in violent crimes during 1990s and about 10 percent of the overall crime reduction. But those experts are perplexed by trends like Oregon’s where incarceration rates have been stable since 2004, yet crime rates continue to fall.

Incarceration will always be a critical tool in crime prevention, but it’s an expensive one. With the average cost per inmate at $82 daily, prisons have encountered the law of diminishing returns. When voters passed Ballot Measure 11 in 1994, each $1 of prison spending yielded an average $2.78 in benefits—prevented pain, suffering, and losses associated with crime. But as incarceration has spread to less serious offenders, the benefits have declined to only 91 cents for every additional dollar spent.

Recognizing diminishing returns, a number of states have enacted policies to slow or reduce the growth in inmate populations. The Texas legislature halted a half-billion dollar prison construction effort and boosted investments in a cost-effective network of residential and community-based treatment and supervision programs. Rather than grow by a projected 17,000 inmates over the next five years, the prison population in Texas has started to decline.

Texas is not alone. California and Illinois have designed performance rewards for counties that keep probationers out of prison. Mississippi and Nevada roll back sentences for non-violent offenders who successfully complete drug treatment and vocational training programs. Hawaii has coupled random drug tests with short jail stays to successfully prevent bigger parole violations and prison sentences.

Innovation is spreading and – for the first time in 38 years – the inmate population in state prisons fell in 2009. Twenty-six states registered declines, but Oregon was not among them.

Governor Kitzhaber, and his newly appointed Public Safety Commission, is building on this national momentum. Business leaders agree with the commission’s philosophy that costly prison beds should be reserved for violent offenders and person-to-person crimes, and that Measure 11’s mandatory minimum sentences should be targeted more narrowly to crimes involving death, serious physical injury, or sexual contact to the victim. Implemented competently, smarter sentencing policies would save hundreds of millions of dollars over the decade with no appreciable change in crime.
 

Give Us Your Feedback