Budget Befuddlement (or, I thought Virginia was doing well)

This week the Governor announced Virginia’s Public Safety Department – whose two biggest units are DOC and the State Police – must shed $28 million in the current budget (and all state agencies must cut 4% in the next budget).  The news reported, “DOC is facing significant cuts including the possible closing of one facility and elimination of overtime for employees.”

The next day, the Governor announced that he was considering tolls on Interstates 64 and 95 to pay for Virginia’s increasingly dire roadwork needs.  That he doesn’t consider tolls a form of regressive taxation that affects the poor and middle class disproportionately more is another in the lexicon ironies of the Republican Party in 2012.

It costs approximately $25 million per year to run a dorm-style thousand man prison like the one I’m in.  It’s even more expensive to operate a “Major”, a high custody facility with weekly stabbings and worse.  Over one billion dollars every year goes to DOC and when the budget cuts come in, what suffers are the programs:  education, drug and alcohol counseling, mental health treatment, the very things that can keep a man or woman from coming back here.

For far too long Virginia politicians – Republican and Democrat alike - have told the citizens of the Commonwealth that the state’s economy was immune from recession and retrenching.  And, harsh sentencing laws were pushed and prisons expanded.  But, bills come due.

Governor McDonnell is beginning his last year in office.  He can be a great Governor by telling the truth about the cost of prison.  He can push for early release, better programs to rehabilitate inmates, alternatives to prison, and in the end save the Commonwealth millions in wasted dollars and lost lives.

Virginia’s budget is a befuddled mess.  The Governor can make a difference.  The time to do so is now.