Report: City Footing State’s Prison Bill
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The state has been saving $50 million a year at the city’s expense, the city’s Independent Budget Office charged in a fiscal brief released yesterday.
The report maintains that while crime rates and the number of arrests have decreased in the city, the time between arrest and shipment to a state facility has increased. As a result, convicted felons are reportedly spending more time in city jails on the city’s dime rather than in state facilities at the state’s expense.
In its findings, the budget office excoriated the criminal justice system, but not any one agency, department, or office. Since 1999, felony detainees who are eventually convicted spent an average of 7.7 months in a city jail before being shipped upstate, the brief states. Five years earlier, the average was 5.5 months. Although this group of inmates constitutes only 8% of the 107,000 inmates in the city jail system a year, they serve about 38% of the “inmate days,” at a cost of $50 million a year, the report says.
The extended stays in the city system are most likely attributed to an increase in mandatory sentences and more stringent plea-bargaining policies, two major changes dating back to the mid-1990s, the brief says.
One criminal justice professor had a mixed reaction to the findings.
“Their analysis about what caused the length of stay is pretty reliable,” Todd Clear, who teaches in the John Jay College of Criminal Justice law and police science department, said. He refuted the $50 million price tag, calling the sum “greatly optimistic.”
Mr. Clear argued that moving a small group of inmates out of a city facility such as Rikers Island at a faster pace would not affect the costs of running that institution, because the staffing budget would be the same either way.
The deputy commissioner of public information for the New York City Department of Corrections, Thomas Antenen, said in response to the report, “The length of time between felony conviction and sentencing has risen in recent years, to a high of 48 days … in September 2004. … As of this June, the time has been reduced to 34 days, a 30% decrease.”
A spokeswoman for the state Department of Correctional Services, Linda Foglia, said, “I don’t think it’s costing Rikers to hold people because of us.” She added, “The bottom line is we are not having state inmates in local jails.”