MONTPELIER, Vt.—Vermont tops the list of states that spend more money on prisons than on higher education, according to a report released Thursday.
The state spends $1.37 on corrections for every $1 spent on public universities and community colleges, according to the Pew Center on the States' Public Safety Performance Project.
Gov. Jim Douglas called it "a dubious distinction. I'm proud of being number one in things like cleanest and safest state in America and the healthiest and smartest, but not in areas like that."
State Sen. Richard Sears, chairman of the Legislature's Corrections Oversight Commission, said Thursday he was unaware of the statistic, but he didn't quibble with the idea that Vermont spends more on Corrections than would be ideal.
The cost of holding one female inmate at the Dale Correctional facility in Waterbury is almost more than tuition for six resident students at the University of Vermont, Sears said.
"We've got to change those numbers around," Sears said. "If you ask most Vermonters if higher education was a bigger priority than corrections, they would probably say higher education."
The cost of housing an inmate at Dale Correctional was about $67,000 in fiscal year 2007, according to Corrections Commissioner Rob Hofmann.
Sears and other lawmakers are talking about realigning Vermont's prisons, looking for efficiencies, finding ways to better monitor some inmates outside of jail and offering improved treatment for drug and alcohol offenders.
Sears questioned if the Pew statistics took into account that Vermont doesn't have any county or local jails that would hold people without their being accounted for in statewide corrections statistics.
The report didn't take that into account, said Adam Gelb, the director of the Public Safety Performance Project. For comparison's sake, state spending data was used but not county and local data, according to Pew officials.
Vermont is one of seven states with combined corrections systems and the Northeast is more expensive than other regions of the country, Gelb said. Of the others, Connecticut and Delaware are fourth and fifth in the ratio of prison-to-higher education spending. Rhode Island is seventh.
But the same Pew report said Vermont ranked third in percentage of total general fund dollars spent on corrections, at 9.3 percent, following Oregon, which was first, and then Florida.
Sears said Vermont's prison spending has been building for decades due to tougher drunk driving laws, longer prison sentences and the few alternatives to incarceration.
Sears' committee is working on bills that would reduce that by finding alternatives to prison for nonviolent felons.
Rounding out the top five were Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut and Delaware. The state that had the lower ratio of corrections to higher education spending was Minnesota, which spent 17 cents on corrections for each dollar spent on higher education.
The Pew report said the 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years ago. The rate of increases in prison costs was six times that of higher education spending in the same period, the report said.
The report said 2,319,258 adults were held in U.S. prisons or jails at the start of 2008 -- one out of every 99.1 adults, and more than any other country in the world.
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On the Web:
Pew Center: http://www.pewcenteronthestates.org.
