Budget Panel Softening On Hard-Line Decisions Frustration Over Prison Costs, Welfare Led To Earlier Votes

Scrimping budget writers on Friday began hedging on their decisions of earlier in the week, dumping another $1.2 million into the Correction Department to pay for housing inmates outside the crowded prison system.

“Nobody wants to talk about the cost of letting these criminals back out on the street, the cost to society, the cost to their victims,” Sen. Dean Cameron, R-Rupert, told the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee.

“We come in here, hogtie them and then complain that they’re not doing their job,” said Cameron, who along with others on the committee was thwarted in authorizing the extra cash on Monday.

But the committee recovered two-thirds of the money by shaving more than $800,000 from Gov. Phil Batt’s 1998-1999 general tax budget for the Department of Juvenile Corrections. Nearly all the reduction was supported by the administration because of financial adjustments made after the spending blueprint was submitted six weeks ago.

Key committee members were also finalizing a scheme to reverse their politically explosive decision on Tuesday to cut off medical care for thousands of children from working poor families. That $2 million in state money - along with nearly $8 million in federal funds - was expected to be formally approved early next week to keep the 5-month-old program going.

Legislative frustration with sky-rocketing prison costs and little financial gain from welfare reform showed through in the original decisions. But the committee also has to trim about $6 million from Batt’s already conservative budget to keep the state in the black.

Opposition to the extra money for housing prison inmates was led by Republican Sen. Stan Hawkins, the eastern Idaho businessman and congressional candidate who has been a loud critic of prison management.

He has maintained for weeks that Correction Director James Spalding should fill up more of the empty beds in the state’s seven institutions so fewer inmates need to be housed in county jails at $35 a day or a prison in Texas at $40 a day.

But Spalding and his allies on the committee argued that managing 4,000 inmates requires the flexibility a relatively small percentage of empty beds provides. Hawkins countered that nearly 200 empty beds in a 3,800-bed system is too many. But his plan to slash that number to just a few dozen was rejected by a two-to-one margin.

“I think we’re trying to micromanage something we know nothing about,” Democratic Sen. Marguerite McLaughlin of Orofino said. “We have professionals out there.”

Hawkins also lost his bid to add a community service coordinator to the Juvenile Corrections Department staff, as Batt proposed, to coordinate the programs local governments are using to divert juvenile delinquents from the more expensive state system.

But while the $72,000 cost amounted to almost nothing in a $27 million general tax budget, the committee narrowly rejected it as the addition of unnecessary middle management.